Athée Canadien
Secularism
Bibby on Canadian secularism
Feb 7th
Special note: this is my 100th post on Canadian Atheist making me the most frequent/obnoxious writer here. Overall this is post 314.
Dennis Gruending, at Pulpit and Politics, has posted an interesting piece about Reginald Bibby, sociologist and categorizer of Canadian religious trends. Unfortunately, as both Gruending and Bibby are Christians (Catholic and Baptists respectively, I believe), the analysis is sometimes biased.
Followers of Bibby’s work out of the University of Lethbridge (where atheist Religious Studies professor and blogger Dr. Jim happens to reside) will remember that he is fond of publishing surveys, steeped in religious language, that purportedly show how the religious are more generous and good than the non-religious [pdf]. He is also fond of declaring that there are no more atheists in Canada today (2007) then there were in 1978 [pdf].
Nevertheless, there are some interesting quotes that I want to selectively pull from this post, about Bibby’s latest book.
Anglicans are coming after us!
Feb 6th
Rowan Williams has endorsed a report calling on all believers to step up against the new atheists.
Drawing particular attention to the threat posed by a new movement of militant atheists, led by Dawkins and Hitchens, it says the Church must respond if it is not to be pushed from the public square.
“One of the paradoxes of recent times has been the increasing secularisation of society and attempts to marginalise religion alongside an increasing interest in spiritual issues and in the social and cultural implications of religious faith,” says the report, called Challenges for the New Quinquennium.
The Church must be “explicit about the need to counter attempts to marginalise Christianity and to treat religious faith more generally as a social problem,” it says.
While I’m a little bit concerned that Canada’s official religion is condemning my beliefs, I find it comforting that they find me threatening enough to warrant a report. We must be doing something right so let’s keep it up!
In French it’s pronounced laïcité
Jan 20th
Quebec, along the same lines as France, is taking strides toward aggressive secularism.
And I don’t mean aggressive like people usually mean “militant” when talking about atheists. I mean that they are actively looking into banning religious symbols across the board for public servants, and by the group of secularists who turned out for a rally there have had it with religious accommodationism.
Even the separatist Parti Quebecois is feeding on this new anti-religious hostility, with their shadow critic for secularism (a position I approve of) stating:
Multiculturalism may be a Canadian value but it’s not a Quebec one. We haven’t signed the Constitution of Canada because it contains this notion of multiculturalism.
Of course this isn’t all news, as dating over the past year there have been attempts in Quebec to ban the burqa but now they’ve banned the Sikh kirpan from the National Assembly (despite it’s allowance in Parliament and other legislatures). The federal Bloc Quebecois is following suit and demanding that, despite the presence of Sikh MPs in the House of Commons, the kirpan be be banned there as well.
On behalf of Canada’s second largest labour union, the PQ is even recommending a Charte de la laïcité (aka a Secularism Charter) that sets out:
The republican principle of secularism should be respected in public services that ensure the security and then apply the requirements. These rights and duties are as much about public officials (strict neutrality) as the users (equal treatment). The Charter should be widely disseminated in all departments and must be visibly exposed and accessible in all places that welcome the public. [translated by Google, see original if your French]
An interesting proposal, which despite the fear-mongering of many of the commentators in the first article, is less about enforcing cultural norms upon society as having a neutral government that treats people fairly. What a novel concept.
My favourite quote comes from the first article I linked to in the Montreal Gazette by Catholic (although not identified as such) Religious Studies professor Daniel Cere:
If you get this kind of consensus about daycare [where Quebecois agreed to ban religious teaching], you wonder what the next step is. I think religious education is going to come under attack.
The Perils of freedom
Dec 31st
Well, I guess it was just a matter of time… the forces of intolerance have been predicting this for a while. I’m still on the side of freedom of expression, even if it conflicts with some feminist values, but the hijab bandit does beg discussion…. what say you?
Stephen Harper Appoints Clergyman to Senate: Pandering to Christian Voters?
Dec 21st
The new Senator, Don.
Perhaps more evidence to support the idea that Harper is developing his ties to the Christian voter base. Upon first inspection, the appointed Reverend, Don Meredith, seems relatively alright :
Meredith is the executive director and co-founder of the GTA Faith Alliance, an interfaith group that is dedicated to finding solutions to youth violence, said the prime minister’s office.
But I was interested in looking at how many overtly-religious (or religious affiliated people) there were on the senate to see if this appointment is a big deal or not. So I quickly ran through the government of Canada biographies and Wikipedia pages of about 20 or so Senators, and, refreshingly, I couldn’t find any other Senators that seemed to be overtly religious or overtly connected to religion. In the wikipedia page of one Senator, I found a reference to his religious affiliation (Roman Catholic) but nothing other than that, which is not worth mentioning anyways. Most of the Senators were either powerful lawyers or powerful businessmen, or both. But that’s nothing surprising, really.
So, from my quick random-sampling of Senators, this appointment seems to be out of the ordinary. From a quick first glance, religion doesn’t seem to have a big presence in the Senate, whereas law and business seem to dominate. So perhaps this lends further credence to the idea that Harper is grooming his Christian ties, perhaps for votes and political capital. If others would like to go and do a more comprehensive study of the religious affiliations of the Senators, feel free. I’m too lazy to look at more than twenty or so when I’m on holiday.
Gnu Atheist Questions
Oct 26th
By Andrew Komar
The factually challenged wingnuts over at the Discovery Institute have asked the scary new atheist movement some questions. I’ll do my best to answer them, but if the courtier’s reply applies, I’m going to use it. I’m an engineer, damnit, not a doctor of philosophy.
1) Why is there anything?
One of the defining principles of quantum physics is the fuzziness of reality, provided you are looking close enough. Call it the uncertainty principal if you want, but nature as we know it has some inherent randomness ’built’ into the universe. One of the stranger aspects of this is seen in the phenomenon of virtual particles, which are bits of stuff that pop into and out of existence in time spans shorter than we generally notice. This weirdness also manifests itself in the decidedly spooky Casimir Effect, but the take home lesson is that points of what we think of as empty space actually are teeming with vacuum energy.
The laws of reality allow matter and energy to pop into existence, given small enough time frames and small enough distances. Our cosmological model has that the early universe being of just this fuzzy size, so small and energy dense that time itself got squished into another spatial dimension (see: A Brief History of Time). This was just before the inflationary epoch. which expanded the size of the universe by a factor of 10 followed by 43 zeroes. If Stephen Hawking and the string theorists are correct, than a self-consistent understanding of physics demands that universes can and will be spontaneously created from nothing. We’re just lucky enough to be in a universe that happens to support our kind of life and allows these questions.
Now, it should be noted that we are beyond any experimental evidence regarding the ‘creation’ event, even in theory. As for the ‘why’ bit, that implies intentionality, which is straight up silly. Try asking gravity ‘why’ it is keeping your butt in the chair. Moving along.
2) What caused the Universe?
Again, ’caused’ implies intentionality, but I think I’ve just explained that the universe is essentially self-caused, randomly, as a necessary outcome of the way physics operates. This question also seems to require time existing independently of the universe, as causality requires time for a sequence of events. Asking about sequences ‘before’ the universe, or what caused the universe without time existing is as meaningful as asking what is north of the north pole.
3) Why is there regularity (Law) in nature?
I’m going to invoke the anthropic principle here, it’s doubtful that we’d be here to ask that question if the universe wasn’t ordered enough for complex life to arise. If our universe is a probabilistic fluctuation in some grander design, than there are also an infinite number of other universes that would not have perceived regularity, because their variation on the laws of nature wouldn’t allow for beings capable of observation. Call it a self-selection bias with a sample of 1.
Besides, just because we call an observed pattern regular doesn’t make it so; ask the financial markets. The two theories that best explain different properties of our universe are mutually incompatible, but we consider both laws. All we can do is attempt to characterize our observations in a systematic fashion, incorporating them into self consistent models that explain and predicting relevant aspects. Science is the endeavor of weeding out the bad explanations based on evidence, but you are still left with models that are limited by what we know, or even can know.
4) Causes in nature proposed by Aristotle (material, formal, efficient, and final), which of them are real? Do final causes exist?
Buh? Anyway, I don’t know what injecting a thinker who didn’t even get inertia has to do with a modern scientific understanding of the universe, but honestly, I have no idea what to say to this question.
5) Why do we have subjective experience, and not merely objective existence?
I think consciousness, an intrinsically subjective experience, is a property of a functioning brain. The specific mechanics of this process are still an active field of research, but I think we have the basics mapped out. We certainly understand the underlying behavior of chemicals, but the 100 trillion or so neurons all interacting with each other in potentially infinite ways is a particularly difficult problem to tackle, but I suspect it is all our neurons firing in a time-dependent fashion that causes our subjective consciousness. That is, mind is what brain does, and consciousness is an epiphenomenon. The fact that it isn’t ‘real’ in some objective sense is no more consequential than the fact that this website is no more than a series of ones and zeroes being interpreted by machinery.
6) Why is the human mind intentional, in the technical philosophical sense of aboutness, which is the referral to something besides itself? How can mental states be about something?
Courtier’s Reply. I don’t really know what is being asked, but if this is some question intended on injecting some mind-body dualism into the mix, I’m not biting. Mental states are, as far as I’m concerned, a product of neuro-biological phenomenon in time, and it is an unnecessary step to include some soul. You are your brain, and your brain is you.
7) Does Moral Law exist in itself, or is it an artifact of nature (natural selection, etc.)
I think it is much more likely that ‘moral law’ is something humans made up to help us make sense of the world as it relates to us. That is, right and wrong are words we use to describe events that happen to humans, as opposed to some set of events that are objectively right and wrong. By this definition, we can understand how moral law has changed through human history (see: slavery, genocide, CO2 emissions) because moral law is simply how we define the rightness of any given action.
However, to assert that your particular preferences on right and wrong are some objective feature of the universe is offensively self-centered. All I can say with any certainty is what I think is right and wrong, and if we agree on those definitions, than maybe we can build a society together that implicitly respects our definitions. We might even build institutions (like a church, or a police force) to enforce those definitions, but they are not, nor have they ever been, objective things in a universal sense.
8) Why is there evil?
Evil is a matter of definition, overwhelmingly as actions relate to us (see the last answer). Sometimes, events like earthquakes happen that affect humans, but the events themselves are not intrinsically evil, because they are the result of a non-thinking process that is incapable of intentionally causing harm. The universe on grander scales is completely indifferent to the trials and tribulations of the little apes on the pale blue dot, but what we do have in our control is how we act towards each other. We are what we choose to be, and if our fellow monkeys choose to act in a way we think is evil, we have the choice to accept or challenge that.
Ultimately though, ‘evil’ will die with the last human being that understands what is meant by evil. The universe got on just fine for 13.7 billion years before us without our metaphysical hand-wringing about evil, and I suspect it will do just fine when the only remains of humanity are our electromagnetic transmissions speeding endlessly through the cosmos.
Any questions?
Canada’s first Muslim mayor
Oct 19th
You know what’s not a big deal but almost seems like it should be: today (or yesterday depending where/when you’re reading) was the first time Canadians elected a Muslim as mayor.
Even more shocking, it was in Calgary, Alberta.
I’ll even admit that I’ve been rooting for him as I’ve learned more about him.
He’s got a vision for my hometown, and has rallied young people in a city known for pathetic election turnouts.
While I would probably disagree with him about religion, no where in his platform does it say he wants to build mosques on every corner or force the women of Calgary to where Niqabs. He is exactly what we as atheists should want from a politician: he may have his faith, but it has little obvious influence on his politics.
Today I congratulate a Muslim for winning in the heart of Canada’s Redneck Bible-Belt.
And hey, since non-existent hell has apparently frozen over, maybe the conservative Rob Ford will win even in Toronto (sometimes feeding the trolls is too tempting).
Secular Countries Often More Developed
Oct 15th
This is an opinion article of mine that was published in the local university newspaper.
A recent study in the U.S. conducted by the Pew Research Center has shown atheists know more about religion than the religious. It’s hardly surprising that atheists everywhere are enjoying a feeling of smug satisfaction. But the study highlights something rather unexpected — while the United States is a very religious country, it’s also relatively uninformed when it comes to religious knowledge. Ignorance is a dangerous thing, and there can be little doubt that the current religious tensions in the U.S. are caused, at least in part, by a lack of knowledge. However, this study gets at something deeper — a lack of critical thinking south of our border.
The study, published in late September by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, asked basic questions designed to test religious knowledge. About 3,500 Americans from various religious denominations completed the 32-question survey. Self-identified atheists and agnostics scored the highest, followed by two religious minorities: Jewish people and Mormons.
Some factors were far more important than others in determining the extent of religious knowledge. For example, gender made little difference, and religious affiliation was relatively important; education, however, was the most significant determinant of performance in the survey. The difference between the genders amounted to only four per cent, while the performance difference between the most educated and the least educated came to a whopping 30 per cent — on average, 40 per cent correct for high school or less, and about 70 per cent for recipients of post-graduate education.
What can explain this difference? It’s interesting that global studies of religion and intelligence have shown a very strong relationship between IQ and religious affiliation — more secular countries tend to have higher average levels of intelligence in their citizens. But less religious countries also tend to be more developed countries, so it’s not as simple as assuming that less religion translates to intelligence. There’s a link between high levels of education, proper nutrition, and low levels of religiosity in more developed countries; impoverished countries tend to have poorly developed educational institutions, higher levels of malnutrition, and more religious citizens.
What I think is a very important lesson to learn from all these studies is that secularism is somehow related to high intelligence and economic development. I’m not going to say that we should all abandon religion if we want to make the world a better place. What we should do instead is identify the underlying causal factor, or factors, that link secularism, high intelligence, and development.
One of the contributing factors is likely critical thinking, the willingness to analyze problems from a certain perspective, with an attempt to find an optimal result, drawing upon the best knowledge available. Developing countries don’t have enough critical thinkers willing to seriously tackle the problems of their society — or perhaps they’re all too busy trying to secure food and shelter to sit around and ponder. Among those few educated people in impoverished countries, the tendency is to move elsewhere. It’s a vicious cycle of under-development.
Assuming that developed countries have more critical thinkers, this idea might also help explain the association of secularism and development. Having a critical-thinking approach to religion often gives rise to the rejection of religion. Atheists can be found debunking religious claims all the time, thinking critically about the evidence for and against gods, angels, and flying spaghetti monsters.
Perhaps the lesson to learn from all of this is that the United States should work on their education and critical thinking abilities. Having a high level of ignorance — especially of subjects important to societal cohesion, such as religion — is clearly not a good thing. People may not like learning about one another, but it’s better to have an enlightened knowledge of their neighbours’ religious beliefs than not.
The morality of science
Oct 11th
You might be aware that Sam Harris has a new book out. If you’re a fan of TED at all, you’ve probably seen a sample already.
Personally, I’m not much impressed by the idea, but I haven’t actually read the book yet, so I’ll reserve judgment on it, till I do. This New York Times article addresses some of the reasons why I remain skeptical.
I don’t think we should leave morality to religion, but I don’t think there is some easy out, to ethics, either. We have to live and decide what we can live with… both as individuals and as part of our human groups. There is no formula or equation for this.
Oh, and Happy Canadian Turkey day!
Sense of perspective? Not for us, thanks!
Oct 6th
I suppose in a perverse way, I should take some comfort from this news out of Germany:
A group of German Catholics wants to do away with Santa Claus because of the fictional figure’s commercial hype and replace him with St Nicolas and the selfless giving they say he represents. Even before shops fill with Santa-themed goodies, the Bonifatiuswerk of German Catholics — a Catholic aid organization — has begun calling for “Santa Claus-free zones.”
Obviously this is a ridiculous fight to be having. What sort of comfort could an atheist like myself possibly take from a brainless and inconsequential religious squabble? In a time when India is being forced to deal with a battle over whose god should be allowed to be worshipped in a mosque, when the West Bank has to deal with terrorist attacks on religious sites, when a moron from Florida can cause the death of people he’s never met over a decision to burn a book, and when the state of Iran can bludgeon a woman to death with big fucking rocks (but not so big that they kill her instantly), this is what religious groups in Germany are doing. Fighting about Santa.
I fervently wish that these were the only types of problems that religious groups were getting involved in. Quite frankly I’d be happy for them to spend all of their considerable time and resources protesting the Easter Bunny, rather than insisting that my cousin can’t marry his boyfriend, or that my sister has to be forced to bring to term the child of her rapist (both stories hypothetical for me personally, but real for thousands of people). As religious groups begin to lose their influence, perhaps this is the kind of world we’ll live in – one that isn’t safe for Santa, but is safer for those of us who actually exist.
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