Sam Harris vs Noam Chomsky - atheist writer in search of a cause?

It was one of those Facebook moments, I saw a link to Sam Harris' website promising an exchange between him and Noam Chomsky. I thought that that would likely be an odd conversation to have. Here's a neuroscientist who essentially wrote one short - but bestselling - atheist polemic that I enjoyed reading a great deal. Then came a dreadful book on how science can determine human values and I didn't bother reading whatever he produced since then. Well, then there's Noam Chomsky. You will know (of) Noam Chomsky. He doesn't need an introduction. Love him or loathe him, unlike Harris he is one of America's foremost intellectuals.

I have come to know Chomsky as an invariably courteous correspondent who takes the time to reply to emails even while being overwhelmed with many other competing demands on his time. I couldn't believe - and I encourage you to read the beginning of Harris' exchange with Chomsky - Harris approach to this exchange. You would have thought that there would have been a mutual interest on both sides to have a public debate with a view to publishing the content of that debate.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Harris tells Chomsky that there are purported millions of followers both have that would just appreciate this debate. Chomsky doesn't clearly care one way or another. I must say, I have never heard such nonsense before. I can't wait for Harris to write to the Pope with a similar declaration, insisting that the Pope just must reply to him, because both men have millions of followers that can't wait to read said exchange.

Anyhow, I wasn't surprised to see Chomsky being too polite to tell Harris to go away and leave him alone (he tried initially, but being the guy he is, he eventually relents and engages Harris). Harris, ever keen on publicity, writes early on that he wants Chomsky to reply in such a way that the exchange can be published. Chomsky says 'no', it's one thing to agree to an informal email forth-n-back with someone harassing you for replies, it's quite another to see that published. Well, to cut a long (email conversation) short, Harris eventually coaxes Chomsky into agreeing to let him publish the exchange on his website.  You can tell, Chomsky mostly wants to end the conversation, so he succumbs to Harris bugging him, in order to move on with his actual work, rather than indulge Harris any longer.

I can't help but wonder what Harris' next publicity stunt will look like. My bet, Harris emails Pope. Dreadul, just dreadful. I finally got the meaning of 'people full of themselves'. It tells you all that you need to know about Harris that he chose to actually publish this exchange.

Another review of 50 Great Myths About Atheism

Courtesy of the author, Diesel Balaam. It was originally published in the pages of the Pink Humanist, on page 15. The magazine is published by that wonderful Pink Triangle Trust, an organization of which I am proudly a Patron.

50 Great Myths About Atheism

 

Russell Blackford & Udo Schűklenk Wiley Blackwell

 

ISBN 978-0-470-67405-5

 

Richard Dawkins was spot-on, when he commented that it was useful to have all 50 myths about atheism listed in one book (having encountered all but 3 of them himself), so Blackford and Schűklenk's book will be invaluable to any atheist who comes up against charges that range from the challenging "Atheists are Certain There is No God" via the insulting "Atheists are Intolerant" to the downright pernicious "Atheists are to Blame for Religious Fundamentalism".

 

The need for such a book is perhaps a little mystifying to those of us living in the north western corner of Europe, where to declare oneself an atheist generally excites little controversy - at worst, it causes minor irritation to some, akin to declaring oneself a Chelsea supporter. Outside of ethnic minority circles, atheism (or more accurately, secularism) appears to be the modus operandi of the vast majority of citizens, who distance themselves from, and distrust, overt religiosity, certainly of any Abrahamic stripe. Nonetheless, Blackford and Schűklenk quickly broaden out from a slightly US-centric starting point to encompass a wider perspective that includes Muslim countries where the safety of declared atheists really is precarious.

 

Blackford and Schűklenk provide an informed, reasoned, and calmly dispassionate deconstruction of the many myths used to try and discredit the atheist position, whether those myths are borne of genuine misunderstandings, or desperate cynicism. In particular, the risible - if tenacious - arguments, deployed against atheists by Dinesh D'Souza, a prolific "religious apologist" (as the authors describe him), are systematically unpicked throughout the book and exposed as ill thought-out, flawed and cynical. This is of particular relevance to gay atheists and secular humanists, as D'Souza's starting point is that we became atheists just to swerve the Almighty's opprobrium for our sexual immorality!

 

The authors' ability to summarise a complex argument is impressive. For example, at the end of their detailed deconstruction of Myth 39 "Atheism Depends on Faith, Just the Same as Religion" they roll their entire argument into just 34 words: "Atheism is not a faith position because atheists do not require something extra that can be called 'faith' to bridge the gap between experience of the world and extraordinary beliefs about a transcendant realm". How cool is that? This book will help many an atheist fortify their position, as well as provide the means to articulate it more effectively.

 

50 Great Myths About Atheism is thorough, meticulously reasoned, and impeccably well-referenced and researched; its avoidance of jargon and academic grand-standing shows this was intended to be a very accessible book and is all the more welcome for it. The authors are sparing in their use of witty asides and mockery, no doubt anxious to avoid the charge of facetiousness, although the inclusion of some choice Jesus & Mo cartoons for the succinct illumination of various points does add a lighter discursive dimension to the book.

 

Perhaps some will find the authors' approach slightly too dispassionate and cautious at times. Myth 28 inadequately deals with Hitler's alleged atheism (he was, in fact, professing his ambivalent faith well into the early 1940s - nor is any mention made of those rather more tangible "Gott Mit Uns" Wehrmacht belt-buckles), while in Myth 29 the reader will detect some pussy-footing hesitancy to criticise the followers of Islam. Arguably, rhetorical questions are also over-used (see Myth 31 "Atheists are Intolerant"). Indeed, in his assessment of the book, Richard Dawkins states that "the long final chapter treats theological arguments with more respect than I would have bothered with".

 

Nonetheless, in spite of its Hush Puppy liberalism, assembling 50 Great Myths About Atheism into one book like this was the authors' master-stroke, a neat and dynamic way of organising and unifying what could otherwise have been a rather disjointed atheist treatise. This is what ultimately gives the book its authority and immediate appeal as a "go-to" source for any atheist who is in a hurry to marshall good contrary arguments, in order to defend their position against any pushy religionist who feels their elaborate nonsense of choice is under threat.

 

50 Great Myths About Atheism out in Polish

Russell Blackford and my 50 Great Myths About Atheism is finally out in Polish. You can get it here in case that language edition is of interest to you :).

Why tax funding for Catholic schools is wrong

This week's column in the Kingston Whig-Standard.

Ontario doesn’t have just one publicly funded school system. We actually afford ourselves the luxury of a public school system and a taxpayer-funded sectarian school system, namely a Catholic school system. The reasons for this are historical, and they are well known. The Confederation pact included a deal that guaranteed the Catholic minority in Ontario a publicly funded school system. It was defended at the time as a means to ensure religious freedom for the Catholic minority in the province.

The reality is that genuine freedom of conscience — as opposed to mere religious freedom — can only be sensibly guaranteed in a society operating a strict separation of state and church(es). The state has no business in funding or subsidizing sectarian educational outlets, hospitals and other institutions. If a religious organization wishes to run its own school or hospital, well, it should put up the cash for it or go away if it is unable to find it. It cannot be that in the 21st century huge amounts of scarce tax monies are provided to religious, ideological educational outfits that preach values that contradict what modern Canada stands for in the world. On anything from reproductive rights to end-of-life issues to marriage equality, the Catholic Church consistently finds itself not only on the wrong side of history, but it also propagates views that the majority of us don’t share. And that is putting it mildly. The very nature of Catholic ideology puts it at loggerheads with anti-discrimination legislation in the province. I am sure you have not forgotten, either, how Catholic school boards across Canada tried to prevent girls in their schools from getting access to the cervical cancer preventing HPV vaccine. The usual Catholic hangups about sex came in the way of protecting girls efficiently from cervical cancer. That kind of nonsense is what our tax monies provide financial backing for in Ontario.

A promotional video produced by Ontario’s Catholic schools has been making the rounds on the Internet during the last few weeks. It features a bunch of students, parents and teachers working in these schools, praising their superior moral education. A lot has rightly been made of the fact that this video implicitly claims to provide a superior education due to the religious values it transmits to its students. Religious organizations, and the Catholic Church is not a unique case here, have always had a keen interest in getting their hands on children. Long-term survival of these ideologies depends on being able to indoctrinate young people at an early age, while they are still impressionable. Despite claims to the contrary by the Ontario Catholic schools that used this video to promote themselves to prospective students and their parents, it is clear that their proposition is that not only are their schools better, but also that their graduates are better human beings courtesy of their ideological religious indoctrination. This is surely offensive to anyone who went to a public school who doesn’t share these particular sectarian values — that would be most of us.

You cannot help but marvel at the guts these marketers of all things Catholic clearly possess. There they are, representatives of an organization whose senior staff spent decades protecting child-molesting pedophiles among its staff across the globe. The German historian Karlheinz Deschner produced a 10-volume opus magnum dedicated to the criminal history of the Roman Catholic Church. Bits and pieces of his detective work are available in English translations, I do recommend them to your attention if you are interested in this issue at all. Even if only half of the horrors he documents in those volumes are true reflections of what actually happened, there can be no doubt at all that the Catholic Church and its representatives should really spend more time reflecting on their own organizational misconduct than on telling us how we ought to live our lives. We certainly should not deliver our children into their schools, and we certainly should not provide tax monies to them in order to ensure the indoctrination of future generations of children with this particular ideology.

The United Nations Human Rights Commission (www.cbc.ca/ontariovotes2007/features/features-faith.html) reportedly agreed in 1999 that Ontario’s exclusive funding for Catholic schools and no funding for other religious organizations’ educational outfits discriminates unfairly against non-Catholics. That said, the situation is worse than it looks. Catholic schools actively discriminate against non-Catholic teachers for employment purposes — using our tax monies to do so — while Catholic teachers are, of course, welcome in our public system. The result is a significant overrepresentation of Catholic educators in the school system.

Sectarian schools are divisive. The video I mentioned earlier features a number of students clearly feeling superior over their public school counterparts, because of the Catholic values that they have internalized courtesy of years of indoctrination. What they ought to have learned is that there is a variety of competing religious ideologies, what these ideologies preach, what their histories are, and so on and so forth. What they shouldn’t have been taught year after year after year is that a particular ideology is true. Cohesive societies are impossible to build under such circumstances. It is obviously unjust to financially privilege Catholic schools only. Seemingly, the Roman Catholic Church sees nothing quite wrong with being in such a privileged situation. It’s this understanding of morality, of course, that has given this particular church such a bad reputation in most developed nations. And don’t take my word for it, the last leader of the church, Pope Benedict (www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2041638/Pope-admits-questionable-reputation-Catholic-church-final-day-Germany.html) conceded that the church these days has a “questionable reputation.”

Konrad Yakabuski, in a www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/chapter-and-verse-catholic-school-fundings-unfair/article16462714/ commentary penned for Toronto’s Globe and Mail newspaper, argued this week that public funding for Catholic schools in Ontario ought to end. We should have a debate in Ontario about a school system that we clearly cannot afford any longer and that surely is not fit for purpose. We face declining enrolments, a result of our changing demographics, yet we continue to run a school system that was conceived in very different times indeed. It is time to end public funding for Catholic schools. The majority of Ontarians agree. Consistently, opinion polls indicate that the majority of us want to see public funding for Catholic schools gone sooner rather than later.

Udo Schuklenk is a philosophy professor at Queen’s University, his most recent book is “50 Great Myths About Atheism” (co-authored with Russell Blackford, Wiley-Blackwell 2013). He tweets @schuklenk.

There is no 'War on Christmas'

Here's a link to this weekend's column in the Kingston Whig-Standard.

It’s that time of the year again where books need to be sold and the alleged atheists’ war on Christmas needs to be fought again at all cost.

Failed U.S. vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin is currently busily hawking her book on the topic, Fox ‘News’ has also started its annual War-on-Christmas campaign, lest we forget that Christmas is coming. For better or worse, being connected to that part of the world courtesy of the Internet and cable TV, even Canadians can’t quite escape the manufactured outrage by assorted business minded Christians like Ms Palin.

So, quick reality check: do us atheists fight a war on Christmas, and presumably elsewhere holy wars on Eid, Diwali and whatnot else that is celebrated by our religious brethren? Do we celebrate anything spiritual at all or is our life really one of eternal boredom stripped of anything deep and meaningful? Our kids, are they really robbed of Santa Claus when all the other kids dress for the occasion?

Well, brace yourselves, most atheists in the West are actually known to celebrate Christmas. It is true that we do not treat Christmas as a time of religious worship, but hey, that puts us in the same boat as the vast majority of Canadian Christians. The latter cannot quite be bothered to trek down to their local church and listen to a preacher’s sermon even during their supposedly most holy of religious events. Incidentally, in addition to Christians we have a hell of a lot of Canadians who worship competing invisible friends in the sky, so they also don’t do Christmas as the Christian churches want us to do. The odds are that the majority of Canadians do not actually treat Christmas as a time of worship but a time of public holidays, gift shopping and literally any number of other things that have zilch to do with the God-related activity that Christmas historically was all about. Most of us have kind of grown out of the religious appendage attached to Christmas. That doesn’t stop us from giving gifts to our kids and each other. It’s also that time of the year where many of us feel sufficiently guilty about not having donated a great deal of money to charitable causes, so it’s the cashing-in time of the year for charities. The spirit of giving isn’t quite dead yet, but it is by and large stripped of its religious meaning.

Atheists would do more or less the same thing in majority-Muslim countries around Eid, and in majority-Hindu countries around Diwali. There is even that peculiar Mexican Dia de Muertos, its Day of the Dead. It is probably fair to say that most Mexicans today will not subscribe to the ancient Aztec beliefs that gave rise to the Day of the Dead. One also can’t help but wonder how many the Muslims enjoying their Eid al-Adha celebrations would be willing to sacrifice their sons to their God, because Eid celebrations are actually celebrating a father’s willingness to sacrifice his son to demonstrate obedience to Allah – it goes without saying that the Bible offers similarly disconcerting stories of human sacrifice in the name of the Lord.

Typically atheists in those countries will simply join in the festivities and get on with their lives. We certainly don’t think it’s worth celebrating someone’s willingness to kill their children for the sake of making their respective God happy. It’s just not how we roll.

Richard Dawkins, one of the better known atheists these days, makes no secret out of his love for Christmas carols, and being an Englishman, the pulling of crackers, the smell of the Christmas tree and so on and so forth. Surely there’s nothing wrong with this. After all, the practice of gift giving around Dec. 25 turns out to be a practice pre-dating Christianity. It can easily be traced back to pagan celebrations of the northern hemisphere’s winter solstice.

What’s more difficult to accept, however, is that public holidays are inflicted upon us around Christmas time. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy holidays as much as the next guy, but there’s something inequitable about how we prioritize Christian religious events over similar events celebrated by other religions. This matters, to my mind, because, as I mentioned earlier, Christmas has been stripped of its religious significance for most of us. So, why should we continue to have public holidays around Christmas instead of Eid, or international human rights day, or whatever else? Why not add a number of holidays to our annual leave budget and leave it to us when we would like to take them.

This surely would not stop Christians – and anyone else wanting to join in their celebrations – from enjoying Christmas. Those of us subscribing to different religious views – or none – would then be free to continue going to the gym, going shopping, being at the office, instead of being shut down for a few days while Christianity is at its celebratory activities. As it stands we unfairly prioritize these traditions over other religious traditions, and the ‘nones’, like me. That is patently unfair.

The state surely would do well to remain neutral in religious affairs. Inflicting religious holidays on everyone isn’t quite what neutrality looks like.

You could call this a war on Christmas if you wish, but at best it’s a war against Christmas holidays. I call it a campaign for fairness toward the majority of Canadians to whom Christmas is merely a cultural event, an event stripped of religious meaning altogether. You could rightly point out that the majority of Canadians are still Christians. That is true, on paper anyway. I guess my case is based on the fact that the vast majority of Canadian Christians can’t even be bothered to visit their houses of worship during this most significant time in their calendar, because – like everyone else – they are too busy gift shopping, visiting friends, and whatnot else. So, an important cultural event it arguably is, a religious event demanding a public holiday, not really.

Udo Schuklenk teaches at Queen’s University, with Russell Blackford he is author of 50 Great Myths About Atheism (Wiley 2013), he tweets @schuklenk

The reasonableness of atheism

The Jamaican national broadsheet The Gleaner published during the last two weeks columns by one of its columnists, Ian Boyne, attacking atheists. You can find them here and here. Today the paper published my response to Boyne. I replicate that response below.

Over the last two weeks, Ian Boyne decided to call a spade a spade as far as us annoying atheists are concerned. They were two overly long columns, saturated with names of people he likes and scorns. Their authority typically is celebrated by means of affiliation or Oxford University generally.

Boyne even manages to ascribe competencies to Christian writers he agrees with that they demonstrably do not have. Alistair McGrath, a Christian theologian trained in history whose qualifications even include a doctorate in molecular biology, is declared without further ado a philosopher by Mr Boyne.

While he says he is braced for ad hominem attacks by 'trite atheists', it strikes me that such generalised statements about a very diverse group of people are, well, ad hominem themselves, aren't they? Reading his columns, I tried to understand what his message to the reading public is other than walking away with the bragging rights of having read more books than those 'trite atheists'.

Well, I have only one column in which to respond to Mr Boyne. I am actually a trained philosopher, in fact a professor of philosophy, and I happen to be an atheist. I can truthfully say that I've read the works of most people he mentions in his columns. Some of these authors I happen to know well personally. Alas, that has not persuaded me of the reasonableness of theism, and that, surely, is what Mr Boyne is after.

I will not spend the next few paragraphs dropping names on you, or at least there will be very few. I will focus on arguments, not prestige, affiliation and whatnot. What I will do is to address - hidden under all those names and Oxford University Press volumes - what I take to be Mr Boyne's main bones of contention with philosophical atheists.

They seem to be these: As human beings, our capacity to understand things in the world is limited by our biological limitations. There could be realities that are beyond our scientific abilities to discover.

Among others, one of Mr Boyne's favourite Christian apologists, Alvin Plantinga, has developed this kind of argument. He claims that we would have no reason to assume that our cognitive faculties are reliable if they were just the product of evolutionary processes. So, he ends up proposing a form of evolution - many of Mr Boyne's fellow Christians will shudder in disbelief - that includes an element of divine guidance, as only that would give us reason to trust our faculties. After all, God wouldn't fool around with us, or would He/She/It? Well, most philosophical atheists happen to be philosophical naturalists. Guilty as charged, Mr Boyne.

We acknowledge our scientific limitations. To us, the fact that our intellectual capacities are limited by the state of our evolution is not evidence that there is something else to be discovered that is outside our senses and that we just cannot grasp.

BOYNE DESPERATE

Incidentally, talking in this context vaguely about 'non-scientific ways of knowing', as Mr Boyne does, sounds a tad bit desperate to me. Unless he, or his fellow Christian apologists, give us a bit more meat to play with, let me just say that I do think this theological emperor is pretty naked. It appears to me that naturalistic processes provide us with the necessary reliability in selecting true beliefs about the world around us.

How can we test that claim? One way would be to point to our never-ending and ever-accelerating scientific progress. We know more about the world and the universe than we ever did. Insisting that there could be something else around us that we just cannot grasp by means of scientific inquiry is, for all practical intent and purposes, just hand-waving by the religious.

Is it possible that there is something else in the universe that we cannot grasp because of how we have evolved? Sure, it's possible. Just as it is possible that our planet rests on a metaphysical teapot that our scientific methods have so far been unable to discover and that requires Boynian 'non-scientific ways of knowing' to understand it.

What I am trying to get at is that raising this exceedingly unlikely possibility is clutching at straws. It's a desperate attempt by theists to avoid drowning in an ever-increasing sea of scientific knowledge.

So, even if Professor Schellenberg has a philosophical point, nothing follows with regard to the reasonableness of theism. Perhaps that is the reason why he is an atheist. At the end of the day, you have to assign probabilities to these sorts of theoretical possibilities. And the probabilities are vanishingly low for the God proposition.

To support his views, Mr Boyne cites an atheistic philosopher, Thomas Nagel, at great length. The thing about Nagel is that his book on the subject matter (as well as an earlier article in a leading philosophy journal) was ripped to pieces by evolutionary biologists and philosophers specialising in the study of biology. Nagel does not appear to have a sound grasp of

evolutionary theory. Hence his tacit support for 'intelligent design' is not based on a sound understanding of the scientific matters at stake.

MISPLACED EXCITEMENT

Mr Boyne also gets excited about another poster boy of current-day Christian apologetics, William Lane Craig. Boyne claims that he has seen many an atheist debate Lane Craig, but he has not seen a single one floor him. Funnily enough, I have seen many of these debates, too, and it seems to me that Lane-Craig looks bad in pretty all of them, but so it goes, I guess. You'll always give more credence to those batting on your team.

Lane Craig's claim to fame has been his attempt to recycle medieval Christian and Islamic theologians' attempts at proving the existence of God by means of a cosmological argument.

Basically what's done in this argument is to use remarkable features of our natural world, particularly its origin in the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago, and posit God as the best explanation. Of course, 'God' is really a place-holder indicating what we do not know today. If history is anything to go by, we are likely able to find out tomorrow.

However, even if we never found out, 'God' would still not constitute an explanation for things we do not understand in the world around us. And if we do find out, there would probably be some further mystery for which 'God' will be offered as an 'explanation'.

At the heart of this all, seemingly, is the need of religious believers to attain something approaching certainty about their various godly saviours. If they had simply decided to stick to believing that their God exists, everything would be hunky-dory. But no, they started fantasising about ways of 'knowing' about their invisible friend in the sky. They tried hard to develop logical proofs for the existence of their gods, and what not else. All that failed.

Even if one granted them everything they're saying about the limitations of scientific inquiry, nothing follows at all with regard to the existence of 'God'. Scientists would have no problems at all adapting their methods if they turned out to deliver new insights. Meanwhile, vague reference to 'non-scientific ways of knowing' won't do.

To give credit where credit is due, Mr Boyne seems to search seriously for answers to obvious doubts that he must have about his beliefs. Why else would he spend this much time engaging in debates with 'trite' atheists in the pages of this paper? After all, he could squander words beating up on homosexuals, as his fellow columnist Mr Espeut is wont to do.

It's a good thing that Mr Boyne, even if he cannot let go of his beliefs, is looking sincerely at the arguments. There is some empirical evidence to suggest many people might never be able to let go of their deeply held religious beliefs. It could well be biological and irreversible. No, I am not kidding here. In case you care about religiosity as a biological phenomenon, you might want to check out Andrew Newberg and Eugene D Aquili's book Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief.

Udo Schuklenk is a professor of philosophy at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada, and with Russell Blackford co-author of '50 Great Myths About Atheism'. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com. Schuklenk tweets @Schuklenk

On religious accommodation

Here's this week's OpEd from the Kingston Whig-Standard.

Quebec has done it again. Right after introducing legislation that effectively would permit assisted dying in the province, Quebec’s government is proposing a Charter of Quebec values. True to French form, these values are secular values.

The most controversial policy proposed is that public servants would be prohibited from wearing religious symbols conspicuously while on the job. I will get back to that “conspicuous” in a moment. Opinion polls suggest that this policy – just as the assisted dying legislation - has majority support both among the Quebecers but also among the wider Canadian public.

My liberal-minded fellow academics across Canada have issued condemnatory declarations, the loudest opposition coming from academics writing in French from Quebec. It seems it is all about accommodating the expression of religious views in the workplace. Being an atheist, I thought about staying clear of this debate lest I lose valuable friends in the academy. My gut feeling was, “They had it coming for a long time, these religious fanatics,” and “Why should they be permitted to confront me with their religious beliefs while I am trying to get professional services out of them?”

After all, most of those affected by the proposed policies would be followers of monotheistic ideologies. It is not unfair to suggest that the ideologies they are adhering to have oppressed most of humanity for much of our history. They have dictated to us what we can and cannot do in the privacy of our homes and they have used their political influence to dictate to governments what they can and cannot do. This is why it took such a long time to achieve reproductive rights for women, marriage equality, and that is why we are still bothering about assisted dying, among other policy issues

But other than me liking the feeling of finally being able to finally stick it to these ideologies, I cannot help but wonder whether the proposed policy is actually defensible in a liberal democracy. Are we any better today in our treatment of them, than they were in their treatment of us? My honest impression is that there are good arguments on both sides of the political divide.

The issue, of course, should not be about religious symbols. It is a non-starter. Why should my red “A” badge, as in “A” for Atheist, not be covered by this prohibition? Or the local devil worshippers’ symbol? What about folks wearing trade union paraphernalia? A cross possibly tattooed on an employee’s arm would have to be covered, no matter how hot it is in the office? Surely the issue should be exclusively about a public-sector employee doing his or her job professionally, not about the cloth on his or her head, right? If I receive professional services from religious employees, why should it matter what religious symbols they wear?

Well, a possible answer to this could be that we often end up talking to these employees as the weaker participant in the conversation. More often than not the public-sector employee is in a position of relative power compared to us. Is it really necessary for that person to be also permitted to wear religious accoutrements that tells me that they likely think I’m going to rot in hell anyway, because I am an atheist, or because I belong to a competing religion with its own invisible friend in the sky?

Looking at it from the standpoint of an impartial observer, I come to see these employees in their professional capacity. I don’t even have much of a choice, because unlike with private businesses, I cannot avoid public-sector employees due to the role they occupy. It is not clear why they should be permitted to drag their private ideas about the universe into our professional interaction.

Typically they hold ideas that may have been reasonable around the 14th century, but that does not hold quite true any longer in the 21st century. So, while they clearly are entitled to hold these views in their private lives, it is unclear indeed what powerful reasons there are for permitting them to drag those views into our professional interactions.

Powerful reasons: How about this one? Religion forms, for many people, part of their identity. Incidentally, the same holds true for other ideological commitments for other people. These ideological commitments could require of them to wear particular outfits. Is it not unreasonable to expect them not to wear that dress simply because they have to interact with folks not sharing their ideological commitments?

As a society enforcing such strictures, would we be any better than the totalitarian monotheistic religions that we successfully fought over time? I think not. At the end of the day, as a society we should not force citizens working for the state to check their convictions at the entrance to their office, provided they do their jobs impartially and professionally.

If they refuse to do the job they were hired to do because of their ideological commitments, we should fire them. No ifs, no buts. However, if they do their job as they promised to do when they were hired, surely their preference for particular cloth covering their hair, or a cross around their neck, should not disqualify them from becoming public servants.

Now, of course, the Parti Quebecois is what it is: is a divisive party with a separatist agenda. Both the end-of-life legislation as well as the Quebec charter proposal are driven, to some extent, by their need to separate Quebec culturally from the rest of Canada.

It is worth noting that both policies seem to have majority support. Assisted dying is overwhelmingly supported by Quebecers, the Quebec values charter commands barely majority support, but it does command majority support.

The PQ is, not unexpectedly, hypocritical in its proposed execution of the secular policies. It turns out inconspicuous religious symbols may be worn. So, if you’re a Christian wearing a smaller cross around your neck and you would be fine. This option is not available to Muslim women or to Sikhs, for instance. For lack of a better word, their headgear cannot be replaced by some miniature version.

Funny coincidence, is it not? That this proposed legislation is driven by rank hypocrisy is best shown by the exclusions the PQ has in mind. The crosses hanging in the National Assembly and elsewhere are there to stay, supposedly for historical reasons. This is complete nonsense, obviously. Why should history provide any stronger ethical reason for keeping massive religious symbols in the public domain than the fundamental needs of Quebecers whose religious identity commands them to wear particular religious garb, even to work?

The only reason to prevent a public-sector – or other – employee from wearing religious garb in the workplace would be that it would prevent them from discharging their work obligations professionally. If that is not the case, I can see no good reason for the prohibition. Any government seriously concerned about the separation of state and church should take a serious look at public funding for religious schools and hospitals, as well as the myriad tax exemptions heaped upon religious organisations as opposed to targeting citizens wearing religious paraphernalia at work.

Udo Schuklenk works at Queen’s. His new book, 50 Great Myths About Atheism (Wiley 2013), is out this month. He tweets @schuklenk

First reader reviews for 50 Great Myths About Atheism are in

Our book is finally out, virtually at least. Since mid August 50 Great Myths About Atheism is available on amazon as a Kindle edition. The print version should be rolling out in Europe in early September, North America in early October etc. We are on, so to speak. The first reviews of the Kindle version have already appeared on the amazon.com site. Here's a flavour:

4.0 out of 5 star Ambitious, and mostly very satisfying Aug 25 2013

By J.A. Rousseau - Published on Amazon.com

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

I spent a little time mulling over whether this should be a four- or a five-star review. In truth, I'd have liked to award a 4.5 star rating, because the book is perhaps slightly too ambitious, with the authors setting a standard that was always going to be difficult to full satisfy. The main concern I have can perhaps be summarized in saying that it's sometimes unclear who the audience of the book is intended to be, and the tone and content of various chapters ends up seeming slightly inconsistent as a result. Sometimes one gets the impression that the book is "arming" atheists against the caricatures of theists, and at other times, that theists are being addressed in an attempt to dispel their confusions. This gives rise to an unevenness in the level of detail, and also the tone, of various chapters.

As for the reasons why I'd want to award at least 4, and ideally 4.5 stars, the book is enormously instructive. For the patient reader, the level of detail in many of the chapters is superb, and even for "myths" that you're already very familiar with, you'll often find a citation or example you didn't yet know about. The book begins by asking you to consider what are quite tricky questions, even before proceeding with discussing the myths - namely in discussions of who "counts" as an atheist, and what should count as myths. In my view, this could be described as one of the more challenging elements of the book to write, in that there are all sorts of opportunities for readers to take issue even at that early stage, rejecting the authors' definitions, and choosing to adopt an uncharitable attitude to the rest of the book as a result.

However, Blackford and Schüklenk set the tone for the rest of the book in those introductory sections, explaining with great clarity and to good persuasive effect that certain questions can be set aside, or at least resolved to a sufficient extent to make the myths that are dealt with worth focusing on. As I say, that rhetorical and argumentative skill is then carried throughout the book, leaving the reader feeling both enlightened and entertained in the reading of it.

I'd highly recommend this book for (at least) two sets of readers: first, the honestly curious theist, who is suspicious of the easy dismissals that some of his or her kind deploy against atheists. Second, the atheist who wants to develop a thoughtful, well-reasoned set of defenses against some of the stereotypes that are assigned to atheists - not only by theists, but also in popular culture.

(Disclosure: I am personally acquainted with both of the authors, and one is a colleague of mine. I do not however regard that as having influenced my comments unduly.)

5.0 out of 5 stars As good as the editorial reviews said Aug 24 2013

By peter veitch - Published on Amazon.com

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Excellent thinking about this important topic. Some good ideas that are new to me. I have changed some views after reading this.

Brief Up-date on Projects

Friends, just a quick up-date on my various writing and editing writing projects. The Wiley-Blackwell book '50 Great Myths About Atheism' that Russell Blackford and I wrote is now at proof stage. Russell and I have received the proofs yesterday and we've got about 4 weeks to check about 300 pages of content, as well as create a good index.

Helga Kuhse, Peter Singer and I have also agreed on the contents to be included in the 3rd edition of 'Bioethics - An Anthology'. We are currently waiting for Wiley-Blackwell to sort out the contract before we hand the goods over to them.

I alsop managed to write the first three chapters of 'This is Bioethics', hopefully forthcoming with Wiley-Blackwell toward the end of next year.

The German political system's bizarre state of affairs on offended Muslims

A remarkable article in the German news magazine DER SPIEGEL reports an incident in the German state of North Rhine Westfalia. A bunch of radical rightwingers and a bunch of fundamentalist Muslims ran into each other during a demonstration. The rightwingers clearly intended to provoke the Muslims by showing a Danish cartoon depicting the religious figurehead of Islam in a not particularly favorable pose. As you might recall, when a conservative Danish broadsheet published said cartoon there was a big outcry amongst Muslims (they don't like any depictions of their prophet, neither positive nor negative ones). A lot of people were duly killed by enraged Muslims (including, not unexpectedly, many Muslims). So, when in Germany the rightwing activist group Pro-NRW announced its demonstration and its intention to display the Danish cartoon it knew that its favoured enemy, enraged Muslims, would show up and make complete and militant fools of themselves. and so they did. - Between the two of us, without the help of radical Muslims and anti-Islamophobia leftist counter demonstrators, nobody would have taken notice of the 30 or so pro-NRW demonstrators. But hey, like bulls don't take lightly to red sheets of cloth neither do Muslims or leftists in Germany take kindly to a tiny rightwing group trying to look like they actually have the people on the ground to organise a serious demonstration. Fun was had by all involved: The end result, a whole bunch of seriously injured people, including police officers trying to keep the peace between the two sides.

None of this is terribly newsworthy, of course. Rightwingers (especially rightwing Christians) and fundamentalist Muslims love having goes at each other in Western societies, because the rightwing Christians mistakenly believe they own these places and need to defend them against Muslims wanting to establish Sharia law. It's of course a good idea to defend the secular state against any kind of religiously motivated legislation (lest you want to live in failing states like Iran or pseudo-outfits like the Vatican).

Here's the odd bit. The interior minister of the state where said demonstration took place wants to place restrictions on future demonstrations by the extreme rightwing group. A prohibition on showing the offending Danish cartoon during public demonstrations is in the making. Here is the tortured logic: The Islamic fundamentalists count about 1500 members according to the German security services. There is about 4 million Muslims in Germany that want to have little, if anything, to do with their violence. In order to protect German police officers from their violence it is necessary to prevent the extreme rightwingers from showing the cartoon during their demonstrations.

I have no sympathies for the rightwingers here, but it seems to me as if the German state is caving in to Muslim fundamentalists.  German citizens would - in future - be prohibited from doing things that could offend members of a Muslim fundamentalist sect in the country, lest the Muslims would otherwise go on a rampage injuring police officers and other demonstrators. Freedom of speech is subjugated to concerns about security of the security forces (whose job, among many other obligations, ironically, is to uphold German citizens rights to express even harsh criticism of religious ideologies). I can't wait to hear how the German courts will respond to this interior ministerial edict.

Interesting parallel:  in Jamaica, a Caribbean island state known for its large number of militantly anti-gay Christian citizens, we see the police routinely prohibiting demonstration by gay civil rights groups. Their logic also is that there are so many enraged Christians out there that they couldn't guarantee the safety of the demonstrators (at least - unlike in Germany - they're not concerned about the security of the security forces). Another example of a democratic society caving in to religiously motivated militancy.

The trouble with religious freedom is that it is all too frequently misunderstood as the unrestricted freedom of the religious to run roughshot over everyone else.

What is it about Christians and sex? Really...

Apologies to everyone for being a bit behind with blog postings these days. Russell Blackford and I are busily working away on our next book. It's going to be a follow-up to our popular 50 Voices of Disbelief - Why We Are Atheists. You can buy it now (other than in English) also in Polish, Korean and Spanish editions, if you feel so inclined. I understand that North Koreans won't be able to get their hands on the book because there is no picture of Kim Il Sung on the cover. My bad, should have thought of that :-). Anyhow, so we're close to completing the manuscript of a book tentatively called  50 Great Myths About Atheism. 

It is no secret that I am an atheist, and a gay one to boot, so there's no news in me having little time or patience for Christianity, Islam and whatever other religious this-n-that that has been invented by humans many centuries ago. I would not mind if god people went about their own business, praised their god in their houses of worship or at home and left it at that, but they don't seem to be able to stay out of OTHER people's lives. They just can't. It's not how they roll!

What truly drives me against the wall at the moment is aggressive campaigning by the Roman Catholic Church against marriage equality in the US and also the UK. In the UK, the Roman Catholic Church is now taking its campaign into its schools (taxpayer funded, that goes without saying, the Catholic Church wants maximum ideological influence in state affairs, but it hates paying for the privilege). Faith schools, of course, are a contradiction in terms. It's a bit like suggesting that there could be communist, capitalist, scientologist or any other ideological schools, as if there was more than one empirical reality to be taught. Now, IF that organisation was a beacon of morality and its senior management staff were known to abide by the Church's teachings all the time, I would still disagree with them, but there would be at least some begrudging respect from me for their consistency. The thing is, not a day goes by without further revelations of Cardinals (ie very senior Church management folks running around in usually wonderfully camp dresses - well, if you're into that sort of thing) protecting pedophiles amongst their staff (priests and upward) from state prosecution. They didn't even bother warning parents who mistakenly left their children in Church hands about the impending danger.  Really, I kid you not, they did not!

These same people think nothing of it to tell secular societies today how they should legislate in matters marriage. Old guys who never managed to hold a stable relationship with another human being in their lives - really? Old guys who count large numbers of pedophiles among their ranks lecture us - really? Do you, Roman Catholic Church, really have no shame at all?  On what grounds - really - do you claim competence in matters ethics or actual worldly life?

If you think, by the way, this was just a Catholic phenomenon... here's a Baptist preacher advising his congregation to beat up their kids, crack their wrists even, if they are suspicious the kids might be gay.

If you feel like reading up on Christianity's crimes throughout its history, you might want to take a closer look at learning German and reading Karlheinz Deschner's 10 (!) volume Criminal History of Christianity. It'll be well worth your time, and you likely will be even more reluctant to listen to Catholic clergy going on about morality.

Follow-up to 50 Voices of Disbelief in the Making

Russell Blackford and I published in late 2009 the anthology '50 Voices of Disbelief - Why We are Atheists'. The book has been pretty successful by academic standards. A Polish translation is forthcoming in a few weeks time. The publisher of the book is Wiley-Blackwell, one of the largest academic publishing houses in North America. Wiley-Blackwell is producing a series of popular volumes looking at for instance debunking myths about popular psychology. Russell and I have been asked to produce a volume looking at investigating 50 popular myths about atheism for this series. This certainly is an exciting project, both because of the popular reach of these volumes, but also because both of us thoroughly enjoyed putting together '50 Voices of Disbelief' at the time. Of course, the challenge this time is somewhat different in that we are not tasked with finding and herding together a diverse group of more than 50 contributors, instead this time around we will be writing the book ourselves.

Here then an appeal to anyone who has come across what they believe are particularly powerful myths about atheism that people fall for, do drop us a line so that we can consider including them in our line-up.

Check this site out - very funny

This really is a neat site. Check out some of the episodes! Truly hilarious stuff. Thanks to Raul Kumar for pointing this gem out to me!

Maia Caron interviews Udo Schuklenk

Grin, here's a nice interview by Maia Caron with myself. Enjoy (or not, as the case might be). In case you are interested or can be bothered, here and here are discussions of the views expressed in the interview. I have not corrected the few mistakes that can be found in the original text below. You might want to note that I am not author of the volumes mentioned, but usually a co-editor. In case you want to know what it is that I have written or edited during the last 10 years or so, go here.

Interview with Udo Schuklenk

Posted By Maia Caron on January 14, 2010

I’m hosting an interview series with prominent atheist and skeptic authors called Conversations with Freethinking Authors.

Today, I’m talking to Udo Schuklenk, co-editor with Russell Blackford of 50 Voices of Disbelief, Why We Are Atheists. Udo is also author of The Power of Pills: Social, Ethical and Legal Issues in Drug Development and The Bioethics Reader.

MAIA: Welcome Udo, and I appreciate you taking the time to talk about your and Russell Blackford’s book. I very much enjoyed reading these essays. Not only was it an opportunity to hear favorite atheist authors air recent thoughts on their personal realizations on what it means to be an atheist, but it also introduced me to other areligious authors and their books. It’s a compelling read and a powerful argument for atheism. Thank you for compiling so many excellent essays.

In the introduction to 50 Voices of Disbelief, you and Russell Blackford write that, “Religious dogmas and organizations are legitimate targets for fearless criticism and satire” and “There must not be special treatment for religious ideas of any kind.” I couldn’t agree more. You also mention the importance of Voices of Reason being heard at this point in our history. Why now more than ever?

UDO: I think there are several good but also quite varied reasons for this. One reason is that the religious backlash against humanist thinking is becoming ever more virulent. The UN Human Rights Council has decided to encourage the organisation’s member states to introduce blasphemy laws. I have argued in THE ECONOMIST magazine, ‘freedom of speech “must include the right to ‘defame’ religions” (“The meaning of freedom”, April 4th). The UN Human Rights Council, which adopted a resolution decrying religious defamation as an affront to human dignity, is controlled mostly by countries that are among the most prolific violators of civil rights, including the right to speak one’s mind.

The blasphemy document itself is remarkable in its scope and deliberate vagueness. Notorious civil-rights violators like Iran and Saudi Arabia will now be able to claim with some confidence that the UN is on their side when they clamp down on liberal-minded or secular Muslims. Western countries will also be happy to note that the council thinks the human right to free speech is not violated when they enforce their own, less draconian, blasphemy laws. The UN has firmly established itself as a body that is not even prepared to defend the basic principles enshrined in its Universal Declaration of Human Rights.' This then is the first answer to your question: Religious institutions and the states they control move ever more viciously against freedom of speech to protect themselves from legitimate criticism. We must not allow this to stand. Religious beliefs, ultimately, can only survive if our right to question and criticize them can be efficiently curtailed. If I am right, and we are at some kind of strategic inflection point as far as the influence of organized religions in the Western world is concerned, their fight to maintain their special rights and status will become ever more vicious. Hence, it is important right now for us to speak out and not leave that to very few atheist cheer leaders.

I also happen to think that it is important to demonstrate to the wider public that atheists can think for themselves and that our views about many issues are very diverse. We don’t do ourselves any favors at all by leaving people with the impression that our capacity to think independently is reducible to Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens. We are not a hierarchical religious outfit after all. Our book, the 50 Voices of Disbelief demonstrates just that beautifully.

MAIA: I couldn’t agree more that atheists and anyone who cares about freedom of speech and human rights must act rather than remain silent. In your introduction, you reference contributing essayists, saying: “… some are even wary of the words atheism and atheist words that can carry unwanted connotations in many social contexts.” This is a theme also picked up in Michael Shermer’s essay in the book. He wrote, “Words matter and labels carry baggage,” going on to say that people associate atheism with “… communism, socialism, or extreme liberalism,” and that “… we can try redefining the word in a more positive direction.” There’s an ongoing debate among atheists/skeptics/agnostics/freethinkers/rationalists as to what an unbeliever should be called. Do you think the word “atheist” is a viable term? Or should a new name be coined that would more accurately represent the areligious?

UDO: That’s a very good question. I hold it with Karl Popper on labels really. It’s unimportant to me what label we use as long as it is clearly defined (and packs a punch in the public arena). To me it matters not at all what label it is, but it would be nice to have not too many competing such labels about as they only distract from the main messages and are indicative of sectarian scheming and territory marking. You might recall in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, there is this scene where our would-be liberationists sit in an arena introducing themselves to each other. They all follow pretty much closely aligned (albeit not exactly aligned) agendas and have nearly all the same name bar some small difference in labeling. They go on arguing forever about their small differences and miss the bigger picture as a result of that. I think we would be well advised to go about this more professionally by surveying which label the wider public would be most comfortable with, take that label and move on from there. A good example of how successful this is is the self-labeling of anti-choice campaigners in the context of reproductive rights. They call themselves ‘pro-life’ which clearly sounds much better than ‘we-don’t-care-about women’, or ‘we decide for pregnant women’ or ‘anti-choice’, which is what they really are. Marketing in this context clearly matters, unless we think that our agenda is entirely theoretical and inconsequential.

MAIA: I’ll have to watch Life of Brian again for that scene you descsribe. Good analogy for what goes on in the many-labelled freethinking/atheist community. In your introduction you also write, “It is high time we took charge of, and responsibility for, our own destinies without God, or God’s priestly interpreters, coming between us and our decision-making.” It’s a theme that Ophelia Benson picks up in her essay when she writes: “I refuse to consider a God ‘good’ that expects us to ignore our own best judgment and reasoning faculties.” Do you see more people taking responsibility for their own destinies? And what is the danger when they do not?

UDO: The fact that the number of people clearly affiliated with mainstream religions has been decreasing in the West for more than a decade by now indicates that more and more people have begun thinking for themselves. I suspect, ironically, this is even true for many religious people who confronted the atheist challenge, and on reflection decided to remain with their God. Reflecting on these issues is a good thing. We can only truly live our own lives if we make a considered choice as to the values (and basis of those values) that guide our lives. If we don’t, if we follow religious (or other authority) blindly, we live an other-directed life, and in that sense we don’t actually live our own lives. The ongoing public exchanges between non-religious people and people believing in some kind of higher being actually serve that purpose.

MAIA: “Other-directed life” is an excellent way of putting it. I couldn’t agree more that ”otherness” is a foundational problem, and many individuals don’t realize how thoroughly they are plugged into “they” and “we.” In 50 Voices of Disbelief, a common recurring theme among the atheist contributors (yourself included) is an early questioning of the status quo of the religion you were brought up believing. Why do you think some people believe willingly, accepting without question their entire lives, and others question early, and reject the façade of belief?

UDO: You are asking an empirical as opposed to a philosophical or ethical question. I’m not trained to address this question as a professional. I can think of only one good reason for why someone might decide (unconsciously, if there is such a thing as an unconscious decision), and that is that there is quite a lot of comfort one can take from believing in a higher being. This comfort might be mistaken if there is no such being, as we atheists happen to think, but surely one got to acknowledge that confidence in an afterlife will make it easier for many religious people to cope with miserable lives. This is especially true for miserable lives that seem to have no end. I have always thought, call it arrogant, that those who are stronger willed or stronger minded are more likely to question this comfort and its pseudo-answers than people who are psychologically weaker. Surely there is comfort in knowing that a good, all-knowing entity is watching over you. It’s delusional, no doubt, but believing this must give you a warm and fuzzy feeling, and possibly the strength to deal with life’s adversity.

MAIA: In your own contribution to the book, an essay titled Human Self-Determination, Biomedical Progress, and God, you raise what I think is a very important issue, writing, “Political correctness today seems to demand that progressive intellectuals pretend that the barbarism that pervades many Islamic countries is not happening.” Political Correctness has become pervasive. Do you think that in general, atheists should be more aggressive in criticizing Islam?and exposing harmful religious ideologies?

UDO: Oh, absolutely. As writers like Henryk Broder have rightly pointed out, what we see across the Western world is the political left and political liberals continuing their arguments with Christians, but not with the arguably much greater threat to secular multi-cultural societies, that is conservative Islam. The UN Human Rights Council has already decided to deliberately muddy the waters by claiming that Islamophobia is a form of racism. How offensive is that to anyone who has ever been attacked or otherwise discriminated against because of their ethnicity? People choose these religious ideologies, you don’t choose the color of your skin. – As an aside, if these people argue that they have not even consciously made the choice to be Muslim (or Christian, or Scientologist or Aquarian for that matter), there is even less reason to take their religious convictions seriously, because they’re not meaningfully their own. – I think the conflation of such issues is deliberate.

There is also this continuing stuff about how peace loving Islam and its adherents are, yet most acts of religiously motivated violence we have seen across the world during the last decade or two were motivated by the ideology of Islam. We have all seen time and again on TV how adherents to this ideology have burned effigies of leaders of Western countries where cartoonists ridicule their God. What makes them think that their strongly held beliefs, baseless as they clearly are, deserve special respect? What makes them think that there is some divine right of Muslims not to be offended by people who disagree with their beliefs? I am offended all the time by their views on a lot of normative issues. Do I go out and burn effigies of Islamic countries’ leaders or prominent religious figures? No. Do I bomb Iran’s airline? No. There is no special moral entitlement of Muslim or other religious folks not to be offended by someone who disagrees with the ideology they hold dear to their heart. Protecting religious ideologies from the same acerbic wit that other ideologies (communism, capitalism, liberalism etc etc) have to endure is mistaken. This is what the rough and tumble of liberal democracies is all about. It is important for us as atheists to protect these freedoms against the onslaught of religious (and other) ideologies.

MAIA: I agree with you whole-heartedly on that. In your essay, you also bring up a very important point about the special rights that health care professionals have under “conscientious objection,” that if they “strongly hold personal religious beliefs that are in conflict with what would normally be required of them as a health care professional, they can “legitimately object to providing such professional services on grounds of personal conscience.” This practice is reprehensible and as you write, “It is arguable that, if individuals abuse that privilege by discriminating against particular patients because of their personal convictions, they violate basic standards of professional conduct.” This sort of thing goes on, and yet atheism is considered the unethical force. As you say, “religious consciences are reaching arbitrary conclusions about what is right and what is wrong.” Do you see the need for atheists to organize a more united front and demand that this kind of unfair practice be controlled by government legislation?

UDO: I have written on this issue on my blog and various articles during the last few years. I do believe we should do away with the right to conscientious objection in medicine altogether. Here are my reasons for this: Usually in the context of the abortion controversy, religiously motivated health care professionals claim the moral (and often legal) right to conscientious objection to the provision of certain health care services. The basic idea is that if, say, Christian doctors and nurses object for religious (conscience) reasons to abortion they should not be forced to provide such services. On the face of it this seems uncontroversial. I think both accepting such conscience based refusals to provide health care services as well as assuming that such decisions are uncontroversial is mistaken. Let me explain why.

First things first: health care professionals such as doctors and nurses are first and foremost called upon by us as members of society as professionals and not as members of the Communist Party, the Klu Klux Clan, the local chess club, or a particular church. They provide a public service. In return for this we as society grant them a monopoly on the provision of such services (eg doctors have a monopoly on the provision of many health delivery services, including the prescription of drugs). We as society also invest substantial amounts of public funds into their training.

In many countries abortion is legal to some extent or other. In other words, societies have decided that it is ethically acceptable for women to make such choices (usually within certain well-defined limits). In societies providing public health care, women are entitled to receive abortion services through health care professionals that are publicly funded. These professionals are seen by pregnant women for the purpose of having an abortion. They are sought out as professionals and not at all as private individuals with their own private views on the morality or otherwise of abortion. I think it is preposterous to suggest that such professionals could kind of opt-out of the provision of some services because they feel strongly about such services. Religious provisions are more or less arbitrary. Some make sense, others don’t, and among religions there is little consensus on what is and isn’t ethical. To permit the delivery of health care to be controlled by what amounts essentially to a lottery is unacceptable.

Patients treated by a public sector doctor belonging to Jehova’s Witnesses wouldn’t get blood transfusions, those falling into the hands of an adherent to the Scientology Church won’t receive antidepressants, the list is endless. It’s easily imaginable that a racist doctor belonging to a suitably racist church could refuse to provide life-preserving services to patients from ethnicities other than her own. The conscientious objection to abortion crowd might not like to hear this, but there is no in-principle difference between their objection and that of the medic belonging to the Aryan Nation Church of Jesus Christ Christian. They will, of course, claim that they have ‘better’ reasons and that the competing church (ie the smallish racist outfit) is either not a ‘real’ church or that the racists are ‘wrong’ etc. The thing is, strictly speaking, none of this can be shown to be true, because, as it happens all monotheistic religions depend on untestable claims about the existence of ‘God’.

A reliable delivery of health services (and this includes equitable access) depends on guaranteeing timely access based on health need. Conscientious objections are a serious threat to precisely that. If you are a pregnant woman living in a rural area with a limited number of predominantly conservative Christian or Muslim doctors you might well not be able to execute your legal right to have an abortion at a certain point in time, if respect for conscientious objections was considered to be of greater importance than your access to services.

This argument is very powerful indeed, when you consider the dearth of health care professionals serving the public sector in developing countries. So, the sooner we get rid of the right to conscientious objection, the better for us, the public. And to be clear, if health care professionals feel strongly enough about this matter, they should be invited to leave the profession and do something else with their lives. We cannot reasonably permit a pick-and-choose type interpretation of professionalism to become the norm. As someone who has taught for many years in medical schools, I can testify to quite a number of people who have chosen dentistry over medicine, for instance, because they did not wish to ever have to face the moral conflicts that come into play in the abortion controversy or end-of-life decision-making. In all honesty, these professionals deserve our respect for what I think is a grown-up understanding of what it means to be a professional. I think a strong case can be made for atheists targeting this serious problem policy wise.

MAIA: In Michael Tooley’s essay, he writes, “Most people in the world accept the religious beliefs of their parents with relatively minor changes, and never think critically about those beliefs.” He asks an important question: “Can anything be done to enable ordinary people to step back from their religious beliefs and to consider whether those beliefs are really true?” This question is echoed by many other atheist contributors, among them: Julian Baggini: “Why do intelligent people continue to believe?” Susan Blackmore: “God and the paranormal …. inspire deeply held beliefs and have spawned highly evolved memeplexes that are very infectious and difficult to root out once they are installed in the human mind,” Dale McGowan: “How do we go on, century after century, skating on the thin ice of a system so self-evidently false and self-contradictory?” and Ophelia Benson: “A lot of people think they know things about God which seem to be contradicted by everything we see around us. It’s odd that the discrepancies don’t interfere with the knowledge.” Because the theme of questioning is prevalent in my own book, I’d like to hear what you think can be done to turn the penchant of humans to believe rather than question. Is it possible?

UDO: Another empirical question. I suspect as atheists we probably need to offer an alternative to the needs ‘God’ satisfies (well, doesn’t satisfy in reality, but psychologically – you know, the afterlife, redemption for wrong-doing, some good all powerful big guy watching over you, that kinda stuff). We need to show that a life without ‘God’ can be meaningful and satisfying. I think humanist groups presiding over non-religious weddings and funerals have made a good and quite successful start in many countries on this front. Beyond that, it’s up to each of us individually to provoke believers into explaining themselves and their beliefs. After all, as Dawkins (yes, Dawkins) said once, ‘There is more to vicars than giving tea parties, there are evil consequences.’ US evangelicals were by and large behind attempts to introduce the death penalty for certain homosexual sex acts in Uganda.

I think it might well be worth re-focusing humanist efforts, like the religious organizations have done for many many decades, on developing countries, supporting free speech and liberal causes and their supporters there more pro-actively. The fights humanists have on their hands in places like Nigeria, India and other such countries is arguably of much greater significance than the skirmishing we engage in with Christians in the developed world.

MAIA: Thanks for joining me today, Udo. I appreciate the time you’ve taken to address these topics. If you’d like to know more about Udo Schuklenk, please visit his website. And if you haven’t read 50 Voices of Disbelief, I highly recommend it. Let’s raise our disbelieving voices and be heard.