If your blog uses Snap Shots, I hate you.

Snap Shots is a website which claims to be “the world’s most popular way to give your users a more fun and interactive experience on your site or blog”. What it actually is is a spectacularly annoying collection of boxes that pop up at random as you move the cursor about the screen. It neatly encapsulates all that is wrong with the internet.

For one thing, it’s enabled on a site-level by publishers. That’s great for Snap.com’s business model, but it’s a disaster for the end-user, because while some people may perversely consider the intrusions useful, and may want them to appear on this blog, I think that they get in the way, make selection difficult, and don’t add anything worth having, so I’m never going to install them — but I do have to put up with them on other people’s sites, because the ‘disable’ mechanism doesn’t work properly. (This is important: if for whatever reason you incorrectly like Snap Shots, please bear in mind that you are not offering your users a choice: you are inflicting your preference on them.) This sort of thing should be a browser extension, not a ‘feature’ of individual webpages. It’s either useful everywhere or nowhere and site-level activation makes no sense.

Also I don’t like their rhetoric:

Snap Shots Engage looks for certain key phrases within your site and connects them with the best content in the world. And you don’t even have to write a link.

With a dozen types of Snap Shots and counting, you’ll be able to ensure that your site is always at the leading edge of interactive contextual media by just adding one line of JavaScript.

Snap Shots Engage is an exciting development that could significantly change the way people write for the Internet by both recognizing the meaning of what they say and then enriching it with related content.

Piss off.

Mostly though, I just don’t accept the premise: I don’t think it’s useful for large frames to appear on a mouseover event. Links already have the status bar and title tags for this purpose, and the enormous ‘Snap Shot’ that appears is very annoying if I roll the mouse over a link accidentally or (gasp!) in order to click on it. Most link mouseover events are incidental, and anything beyond highlighting the link is a bad thing.

This sort of thing is quite enough to put me off visiting a website at all. If my experience of your website is that I get angry when I read it, I’ll just stop reading it.

Moral, But No Cigar

NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN that … In order to be of assistance to persons carrying out religious duties within the community, the Council [of the London Borough of Barnet] are, on an experimental basis, introducing a Community Parking Permit that will enable the permit holder to park in any permitted parking place within the Borough’s Controlled Parking Zones.

From the BBC:

Religious leaders on official business in part of north London will be able to park for free using special permits.

…

Applications from worshippers on faith business will also be considered.

Mike Freer, leader of the council, said: “The importance of religion to many Barnet residents cannot be underestimated and the council has acknowledged this with a policy that will assist spiritual leaders when engaging with people in times of illness or crisis.”

And from the Barnet Times:

A new permit introduced by Barnet Council will allow people carrying out religious duties to use residents’ parking bays, to avoid the struggle to find a parking space. … Councillor Mike Freer [said] “This new permit shows our commitment to improving the quality of life for local residents and increasing wider participation for all in religious, cultural and community life.”

Religions currently recognised by the council include Baha’i, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, Judaism, Rastafarianism, Sikhism, Unitarianism and Zoroastrianism. Applications from any other religions will be considered “on their own merit” in consultation with the Barnet Multi-Faith Forum, according to the council.

The following is their attempt at humour:

In the 2001 census 390,000 people across England and Wales declared that their religion was “Jedi”, a belief inspired by the conflict between good and evil in the Star Wars series of films. Census officials bowed to public pressure to include Jedi on the list of chosen religions, but it remains to be seen if the parking badge will be awarded to people carrying out Jedi duties.

This definitely gets my new ‘religion taking the credit’ tag: if these people are doing vital work then their entitlement to permits to help them do so should depend on that, not on their faith. That would allow Humanist, atheist and secular people doing similar work to benefit, and help filter out people abusing the system for indoctrination purposes.

A few weeks before that, a report was published by the Church of England and something improbably named “the Von Hugel Institute” called Moral But No Compass. I would link to the report, but despite being both designed and likely to influence government policy, it isn’t freely available to the public. It costs £9.95. They’re charging for propaganda! (Only religious people ever do that. Well, them and McDonald’s.)

This report, according to the BBC, whose writings I am allowed to read,

The report … suggests the Church is discriminated against in competition with private companies who provide welfare, which Bishop Lowe suggested was partly the result of a continuing process of secularisation under the Labour government.

Well, surely secularisation is a good thing? I realise the Church of England are the last people who are likely to agree with that idea, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have to defend their alternative. That means they have to defend it more — they clearly have a vested interest. (It’s hard to imagine what Labour government he’s been watching that he thinks are “secularising” anything at all.)

It also calls for a level playing field for faith-based organisations including churches, and for a “Minister for Religion” to be appointed.

What the hell would he do? “Hello, I’m the Minister for Religion. Are you doing religion? Yes? Splendid. How about you? Are you doing religion? No? Well, that’s fine too.” There’s no Minister for Videogames, is there? There’s not even a Minister for Sex, and that’s a potentially dangerous activity vital for the future of the country that far more voters practice that religion. I honestly cannot think of even one thing that a Minister for Religion would do. (As such, I’d love that job.) It’s also worth noting that we already have Alun Michael MP running the government’s new “Faiths Taskforce”, and Stephen Timms MP, Labour’s Vice Chair with special responsibility for Faith Groups. And the Lords Spiritual. Is that not enough?

Nor do I understand what the accusation that the government is “religiously illiterate” might mean. I might assume it means that the government doesn’t understand that religion is dangerous, divisive and discriminatory and should abandon its various faith-based initiatives, but it seems more likely that a report commissioned by the Church is using it to mean that the government doesn’t take an active interest in their particular brand of dogmatic pastimes. But since they won’t let me read the report without paying, I don’t know.

The Bishop of Hulme Stephen Lowe, spokesman on urban affairs, told BBC Radio Four’s Sunday Programme that the Church was far and away the biggest voluntary organisation in the country, and had been for centuries.

Good for you.

The bishop said the Church was providing help and support to groups as diverse as elderly, homeless and unemployed people, drug addicts and asylum seekers. It also provides hundreds of chaplains to hospitals, prisons and the armed services, and thousands of schools, he said.

Well aren’t you nice?

However, the report, published on Monday and entitled “Moral, but no Compass”, said the government showed a “significant lack of understanding of, or interest in, the Church of England’s current or potential contribution in the public sphere”.

…

He said if the government wanted to benefit from the huge amount of work being done by the Church, it would have to change the way it dealt with it.

No. No, you’re not nice. What you’re implying, essentially, is that if the government doesn’t start handing you huge piles of public money then you’re going to stop providing help and support to elderly, homeless and unemployed people, drug addicts and asylum seekers. Is that a threat? It looks like a threat.

And it worked:

The event also marked the launch of a Labour consultation with faith groups, entitled Believing for a Better Britain, run by the new Faiths’ Taskforce, chaired by Alun Michael MP. It will be led by Malcolm Duncan, leader of the Faithworks Movement. The consultation aims to hear first-hand the concerns of faith communities and those motivated by their beliefs, in order to reflect those concerns in the next manifesto. Duncan’s lead role will ensure that the reporting remains independent.

That makes perfect sense. You don’t want your consultation into religion (about which disconcertingly little information is available and none from official sources as far as I can tell) to be at all biased, so you should get an independent arbiter in, such as the former Head of Church and Mission for the Evangelical Alliance, priest, and leader of an organisation which ‘exists to empower and inspire individual Christians and every local church to develop their role at the hub of their community’. He should be just nicely detached. He says:

People of faith are making a vital contribution to the United Kingdom. It is impossible to talk about community cohesion, joined up service delivery or strong and sustainable partnerships without understanding this.

and that’s true, but I bet almost all of those people also own cars, and I think it’s pretty clear the government doesn’t consider car-ownership something that should be rewarded.

Ultimately, I’m not against faith groups being involved in anything they might want to play at, but I don’t like the focus being on the faith. Faith is irrelevant at best. Focussing on faith excludes secular and Humanist groups, and it distracts from the main issue, which should surely be the work that’s being done. Charities and voluntary organisations should be judged on their work, not on their ‘ethos’. That way, a faith group that doesn’t discriminate would be at no disadvantage, and nor would a secular group who don’t discriminate.

I maintain that the government should be totally secular: it shouldn’t care at all about the religion of its people or organisations. If you want to run a religious charity, you go right ahead, but you’re still bound by all UK law regardless of what the Bible might say about gay people. “The advancement of religion” shouldn’t be a valid activity for a registered charity (PDF, page 5, although this whole document is ridiculous) any more than the advancement of drinking Coca-cola is, because the government shouldn’t care what religion, if any, you have. If ‘faith leaders’ want to talk to MPs, that’s fine, but they can damn well talk to their own MPs like everybody else. Religion shouldn’t exempt anyone from any law, and nor should it grant you any extra protections — don’t expect the law to act just because something someone says offends your faithful sensibilities. Churches wouldn’t get tax breaks. Obviously any bishops who wanted to sit in Parliament would just have to win an election like everyone else — or maybe make a large cash donation to the Labour Party. (Also I would not allow any private groups to run schools. All schools would be entirely secular and run by the state, and homeschooling would be legal only for those parents who demonstrated they wanted their children to learn a balanced curriculum and have access to support outside the home — which they would be required to demonstrate by not asking to homeschool them.) Ideally, religious discrimination rules would be axed: the government wouldn’t recognise religion at all, but it would recognise that you believe things — and that is a perfectly good basis on which to make employment decisions. Pragmatically, they’d probably be necessary as long as religion was widespread, although I think a general “you must only consider relevant things when making employment decisions” might be a suitable compromise. There would be no law against inciting religious hatred, but there would be a law against preaching any form of bigotry: atheists are evil; gay people are evil; Muslims are evil; whatever. The same law would thereby protect and condemn religious groups as and when they deserve either. And the government wouldn’t deal with organisations like Faithworks, because they exist to promote something that the government wouldn’t recognise.

That’s how I’d run a country. I feel sure it’d save a lot of bother.

“Doing God”

Apparently, a BBC show that nobody watches (hence the interviews ending up in the news in advance of the broadcast) will include an interview in which Tony Blair admitted that religious faith was “profound about [him]“, but that he’d tried to underplay it because otherwise “people do think you’re a nutter”. Well, yes. Turns out, in a shocking revelation, that people like to think you have actual reasons for doing things beyond an irrational belief that an invisible wizard who lives in the sky would like you to do them. When those things are limited to where you spend your Sunday mornings, nobody much cares, but when they’re decisions like whether or not to start a war, people tend to think motives are important.

Essentially, what we have here is a man who knew his beliefs would be unpopular, so he acted normal until he got out of power and now he’s converting to Catholicism, which is by any reasonable definition joining a cult. He knew that people would object to having someone running the country from a religious standpoint so he pretended not to have one. The “we don’t do God” quote has been swimming around the Internet a lot again this week. Essentially he lied about something that he knew people would consider important in order to get himself elected to a position of great power. Surely we have a system to punish people who do that?

Why is it so hard for politicians to think clearly about religion? Blair knew that people wanted secular politics or else he wouldn’t have covered up his faith in the way that he did, and yet he still insisted on advocating faith schools, without doing anything about the mandatory Christian worship in all other schools, the Establishment of the church, or the fact that the Prime Minister was a closet nutter. All the while, public opinion, and that of his own education secretary, was firmly against him. He knew that people disliked the influence of religion on politics, and yet as far as I can see he did everything in his power to increase it.

Make no wonder he thought people might call him a nutter — he is a fucking nutter. (If you doubt that, check out the scary grin.)

I Didn’t Send You An Email About RE Lessons, But It’s Always Nice To Be Thanked.

Some time ago now, the Department for Children, Schools and Families issued a document called “Faith In The System“, which set out their insane plan to put more children’s education in the hands of groups who define themselves by a shared delusion and the voluntary suspension of critical faculties. I wrote to them about this, asking to know on what basis this derrangedÂ scheme was justified and I got a reply about RE lessons. Both of these emails are reproduced in full on this website, in my previous entry on the subjet. This entry contains the reply I sent them and their response to it. Continue reading →

Religious Crackpot Of The Month: October 2007

This month, the Religious Crackpot Of The Month award (I love how these nutters just roll around, regular as clockwork, at least once a month) goes to General Sir Richard Dannatt, who is something called the Chief of General Staff, seen here in fancy dress as a magpie’s nest. He wins the award primarily for making this comment:

In my business, asking people to risk their lives is part of the job, but doing so without giving them the chance to understand that there is a life after death is something of a betrayal, and I think there is very much an obligation on …a Christian leader to include a spiritual dimension into his people’s preparations for operations, and the general conduct of their lives. Qualities and core values are fine as a universally acceptable moral baseline for leadership, but the unique life, death, resurrection and promises of Christ provide that spiritual opportunity that I believe takes the privilege of leadership to another level.

I think that’s all that I need to say to convince you he’s totally mad, but just for good measure I’ll ramble on a little further. My main problem with this is not that there isn’t a life after death (although there isn’t), but that if I were killed without knowing there was a life after death and there was, I’d be pleased, which is not really the same as feeling betrayed, whereas if some crackpot general had convinced me there was and there wasn’t, then I (or more realistically, those who survived me) would feel very betrayed, and that this would be quite justified because they had literally been betrayed.

Even if it could be proven beyond reasonable doubt that there was life after death, he’d still be wrong. Given that it hasn’t, he’s not only wrong, but his position is diametrically opposed to the truth. If you replace the word “without” with the word “after” and delete after the word “betrayal” then you arrive at the truth.

This blog is equally at fault, and is linked by Libby Purves, who has written an opinion piece without expressing one, which would appear to be an act both of spineless sham diplomacy and of sloppy journalism (which is ironic considering she calls her section a “guide to religion and thought” — non-overlapping magisteria if ever there were any). The Times also choose to back this report up with a piece by Ruth Gledhill, their “religious correspondent”, although judging by her output, “religious correspondent” is a description rather than a job title. This is what she said:

I understand the Ministry of Defence was not too impressed by Sir Richard’s unabashed evangelical take on the eschatological aspect of the job he does. … And yet, after all, someone’s got to be head of the Army. Surely, given the close daily contact with death and destruction that Army service entails as Iraq is all to sad a witness to, it’s better that the person responsible for all this is someone with strong religious beliefs.

She is a crap religious correspondent if she understands the issues that poorly. After that is an acknowledgement that other people may disagree, but unfortunately it isn’t a sentence so I can’t infer any views from it:

Or maybe there are some who think not, Islam, Christianity and the state of the world in general.

What the hell does that mean?

And perhaps more to the point, where is the secular reaction to this? Why is that exactly nowhere to be found anywhere on The Times’ website? Why do they have a special Irrational Correspondent and no rational reaction?

I don’t know why I ask such questions. I know already that there exists no answer that will satisfy me.

The Gentle Art of Homeopathic Killing with the Society Of Homeopaths

This is a post from Quackometer, originally found here, posted Thursday, August 16, 2007. His hosts, Netcetera, decided got a complaint from the Society of Homeopaths and decided that they’d rather have him take the page down than risk any further action. This decision was wrong, and Netcetera are a bunch of weasels. My hosts, NearlyFreeSpeech.Net, I’m given to understand are not weasels and have no truck with such complaints. As far as I’m concerned that makes them better hosts.

In any case, if you want to complain to my hosts, then please do, there’s a link above. And guys, if anyone does complain then please pass it on — I could use a laugh. Not that it would matter, since the post is now everywhere. This is what happens when you try to silence the internet. I’m reproducing it here principally because I assume the Society of Homeopaths would like me not to.

The Society of Homeopaths (SoH) are a shambles and a bad joke. It is now over a year since Sense about Science, Simon Singh and the BBC Newsnight programme exposed how it is common practice for high street homeopaths to tell customers that their magic pills can prevent malaria. The Society of Homeopaths have done diddly-squat to stamp out this dangerous practice apart from issue a few ambiguously weasel-worded press statements.

The SoH has a code of practice, but my feeling is that this is just a smokescreen and is widely flouted and that the Society do not care about this. If this is true, then the code of practice is nothing more than a thin veneer used to give authority and credibility to its deluded members. It does nothing more than fool the public into thinking they are dealing with a regulated professional.

As a quick test, I picked a random homeopath with a web site from the SoH register to see if they flouted a couple of important rules:

48 ’¢ Advertising shall not contain claims of superiority.
’¢ No advertising may be used which expressly or implicitly claims to cure named diseases.

72 To avoid making claims (whether explicit or implied; orally or in writing) implying cure of any named disease.

The homeopath I picked on is called Julia Wilson and runs a practice from the Leicestershire town of Market Harborough. What I found rather shocked and angered me.

Straight away, we find that Julia M Wilson LCHE, RSHom specialises in asthma and works at a clinic that says,

Many illnesses and disease can be successfully treated using homeopathy, including arthritis, asthma, digestive disorders, emotional and behavioural difficulties, headaches, infertility, skin and sleep problems.

Well, there are a number of named diseases there to start off. She also gives a leaflet that advertises her asthma clinic. The advertising leaflet says,

Conventional medicine is at a loss when it comes to understanding the origin of allergies. … The best that medical research can do is try to keep the symptoms under control. Homeopathy is different, it seeks to address the triggers for asthma and eczema. It is a safe, drug free approach that helps alleviate the flaring of skin and tightening of lungs…

Now, despite the usual homeopathic contradiction of claiming to treat causes not symptoms and then in the next breath saying it can alleviate symptoms, the advert is clearly in breach of the above rule 47 on advertising as it implicitly claims superiority over real medicine and names a disease.

Asthma is estimated to be responsible for 1,500 deaths and 74,000 emergency hospital admissions in the UK each year. It is not a trivial illness that sugar pills ought to be anywhere near. The Cochrane Review says the following about the evidence for asthma and homeopathy,

The review of trials found that the type of homeopathy varied between the studies, that the study designs used in the trials were varied and that no strong evidence existed that usual forms of homeopathy for asthma are effective.

This is not a surprise given that homeopathy is just a ritualised placebo. Hopefully, most parents attending this clinic will have the good sense to go to a real accident and emergency unit in the event of a severe attack and consult their GP about real management of the illness. I would hope that Julia does little harm here.

However, a little more research on her site reveals much more serious concerns. She says on her site that ‘she worked in Kenya teaching homeopathy at a college in Nairobi and supporting graduates to set up their own clinics’. Now, we have seen what homeopaths do in Kenya before. It is not treating a little stress and the odd headache. Free from strong UK legislation, these missionary homeopaths make the boldest claims about the deadliest diseases.

A bit of web research shows where Julia was working (picture above). The Abha Light Foundation is a registered NGO in Kenya. It takes mobile homeopathy clinics through the slums of Nairobi and surrounding villages. Its stated aim is to,

introduce Homeopathy and natural medicines as a method of managing HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria in Kenya.

I must admit, I had to pause for breath after reading that. The clinic sells its own homeopathic remedies for ‘treating’ various lethal diseases. Its MalariaX potion,

is a homeopathic preparation for prevention of malaria and treatment of malaria. Suitable for children. For prevention. Only 1 pill each week before entering, during and after leaving malaria risk areas. For treatment. Take 1 pill every 1-3 hours during a malaria attack.

This is nothing short of being totally outrageous. It is a murderous delusion. David Colquhoun has been writing about this wicked scam recently and it is well worth following his blog on the issue.

Let’s remind ourselves what one of the most senior and respected homeopaths in the UK, Dr Peter Fisher of the London Homeopathic Hospital, has to say on this matter.

there is absolutely no reason to think that homeopathy works to prevent malaria and you won’t find that in any textbook or journal of homeopathy so people will get malaria, people may even die of malaria if they follow this advice.

Malaria is a huge killer in Kenya. It is the biggest killer of children under five. The problem is so huge that the reintroduction of DDT is considered as a proven way of reducing deaths. Magic sugar pills and water drops will do nothing. Many of the poorest in Kenya cannot afford real anti-malaria medicine, but offering them insane nonsense as a substitute will not help anyone.

Ironically, the WHO has issued a press release today on cheap ways of reducing child and adult mortality due to malaria. Their trials, conducted in Kenya, of using cheap mosquito nets soaked in insecticide have reduced child deaths by 44% over two years. It says that issuing these nets be the ‘immediate priority’ to governments with a malaria problem. No mention of homeopathy. These results were arrived at by careful trials and observation. Science. We now know that nets work. A lifesaving net costs $5. A bottle of useless homeopathic crap costs $4.50. Both are large amounts for a poor Kenyan, but is their life really worth the 50c saving?

I am sure we are going to hear the usual homeopath bleat that this is just a campaign by Big Pharma to discredit unpatentable homeopathic remedies. Are we to add to the conspiracy Big Net manufacturers too?

If I can just interject here — the above paragraph is quite incredibly ironic, and slightly prescient, given the development since. I particularly liked the bit about “Big Net manufacturers”… –Andrew

It amazes me that to add to all the list of ills and injustices that our rich nations impose on the poor of the world, we have to add the widespread export of our bourgeois and lethal healing fantasies. To make a strong point: if we can introduce laws that allow the arrest of sex tourists on their return to the UK, can we not charge people who travel to Africa to indulge their dangerous healing delusions?

At the very least, we could expect the Society of Homeopaths to try to stamp out this wicked practice? Could we?

A lot of people have complained about the Society of Homeopaths since this started. Personally, I’d like to depart from that model and complain about Netcetera. If you’re willing to take down a user’s page just because someone asks you to, you are not in any meaningful sense a web host. Put the page back, you great nancies, and stop running a mile the moment you’re served with a crayon-scrawled cease-and-desist. They’re mostly from big organisations bullying you for their own selfish ends, and if you capitulate then you’re pathetic.

(Update: I’ve edited the thread title slightly, and added a few links, after it became apparent that an inadvertent Googlebomb is happening. It’s perhaps less inadvertent now.)

Religious Crackpot Of The Month â€” September 2007

I recently read in The Times that the government plans to make more faith schools in an effort to integrate minorities better. This is a clearly stupid idea. It’s a bit like trying to put out a fire by pouring napalm on it. Like most newspaper articles, it refers to a document that nobody could read. In science articles these are unpublished research, and in politics stories they’re documents that haven’t been published yet. In this case, the document was published a few days after the article, and here it is. I’ve skimmed it, and I think I can safely summarise that it’s a lot of emotional but empty sentiment and nothing very much of any substance. What substance it contains is almost entirely aimed at downplaying the differences between faith schools and what it calls “schools without a religious character”.

In one way, this is a very bad thing, because including any kind of religious “service” (forgive me if I think “service” is a rather grand term for “indoctrination”) in a context where science, mathematics and history are taught is effectively teaching religious beliefs as facts, which is not fair on children, who have a right to be taught objectively about the world. Any blurring of the line between religious beliefs and facts is a very dangerous thing. Children must be taught to question beliefs — all beliefs — or else they will grow up vulnerable to exploitation by fundamentalists, con artists, and fraudulent and deluded “alternative” therapists. Faith schools also segregate children, which reduces their contact with people of other backgrounds, which causes more segregation and intolerance in the future. Both of these things will have serious repercussions when these (comparatively) indoctrinated, ignorant and intolerant children grow up and adopt positions of power.

In another way, though, this is a good thing: the difference, according to British law, between a faith school and a “school without a religious character” is very small. The document, Faith In The System, reminds us that “all maintained schools [including non-faith schools] are required to have a daily act of collective worship”. If the school has no other faith then Christian worship must be practised. That makes them Christian faith schools in all but name, and this is a big problem which shouldn’t be ignored. The school is required by law to teach children that two thousand years ago a man, whose father was an omnipotent but invisible being, raised the dead, turned water into wine, walked on water, then died and went to Hell at the request of his supposedly benevolent father and rose again, before ascending bodily into a paradise world. The government claims that this plays a vital role in “exploring social and moral issues and [children's] own beliefs”, despite the fact that this worship is mandatory — parents can withdraw their children from it but the children themselves have no say in what, or how much, religious dogma they are exposed to. That is not “exploring their own beliefs”. That is indoctrinating them with their parents’ and the state’s preferred beliefs. RE lessons, which I certainly do approve of, show children a wide variety of beliefs and explores them sensibly. “Collective worship” just shows them one of the available options and teaches them to believe it unquestioningly. That is clearly detrimental to a child’s psychological development.

The rather patronisingly named Department for Children, Schools and Families would appear to think that if we have a load of faith schools anyway then we might as well make some for other religions as well. Whereas actual common sense, and indeed teachers and large sections of the public*, would say that we must remove all influence of religion on education. Neither parents nor the state have the right to dictate what children believe, either directly, by simply telling them what to think, or indirectly, by controlling what influences they are exposed to. Instead, children must be given the right to be educated without also having religious beliefs forced upon them, and to make up their own minds after hearing what everyone has to say.

So this month I’m awarding Religious Crackpot Of The Month jointly to these five crackpots (who all have suitably ridiculous job titles): the “Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families” Ed Balls, the “Minister of State for Schools and Learners” Jim Knight, the “Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Schools and Learners” Andrew Adonis, the “Minister of State for Children, Young People and Families” Beverley Hughes, and the “Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Children, Young People and Families” Kevin Brennan. These publicly elected ministers run a department which has publicly endorsed a document suggesting — and repeatedly made it a matter of policy to — back faith schools and increase their numbers. If one of them is your MP then you can write to them, and if they’re not then you can write to them anyway. Or more simply you can just sit back, wait for a snap election and vote them out of office. Well assuming someone can muster up some less ignorant opposition.

*The public is, as it is wont to be, split on the issue, but here’s a few samples. This petition against faith schools gained 3,191 signatures and this response from the PM’s office, which really misses the point on every possible level. This petition, in favour of faith schools and more alarmingly, in favour of creationism, got 18,699 rather depressing signatures from 18,699 rather depressing signatories, and this response from the PM, which is bang on about creationism but rather vacuous on faith schools. This anti-faith school petition has only 33 signatories. It’s new. Sign it. Similarly this one, with 19. This one‘s been going longer, and has 17,401 signatories, but there’s still time to sign it if you want. (It’s been in the links panel for ages now so you may even have signed it already, I don’t know.) At present this means there are more people who have signed a pro-creationism petition than any anti-faith school one. But it’s close so let’s push it over. Petitions aside, it seems that the general public are mostly against faith schools. Good old general public.

Yet More Proof MPs Are Idiots

A thread on the Bad Science forums has just directed me to this page, a parliamentary early day motion in favour of homeopathic hospitals, along with a list of the MPs who are stupid and/or ignorant enough to have signed it. Here’s the text of the motion:

That this House welcomes the positive contribution made to the health of the nation by the NHS homeopathic hospitals; notes that some six million people use complementary treatments each year; believes that complementary medicine has the potential to offer clinically-effective and cost-effective solutions to common health problems faced by NHS patients, including chronic difficult to treat conditions such as musculoskeletal and other chronic pain, eczema, depression, anxiety and insomnia, allergy, chronic fatigue and irritable bowel syndrome; expresses concern that NHS cuts are threatening the future of these hospitals; and calls on the Government actively to support these valuable national assets.

Almost every word of that is wrong. Homeopathic hospitals cost money and don’t work; that is a negative contribution. “Complementary treatments” is a misleading term and does not refer to homeopathy alone and so the number attached to it is irrelevant and misleading. Complementary medicine cannot offer “clinically-effective” (which should not be hyphenated) solutions to any health problems (except possibly for psychosomatic ones). Threats to these hospitals’ futures is not a cause for concern, the government should not support them, and they are not “national assets”. That’s pretty bad for a single sentence.

It also links to this page which tells you who your local MP is and how to contact them, so that if yours is on the list (mine isn’t) you can let them know that the NHS should probably not be spending millions of pounds of your money on hospitals whose stated goal is to prescribe a nice cool glass of water for every known illness.

I shall add this motion to my long list of reasons not to like Ann Widdecombe. The only other name on there I know anything much about it Lembit Opik, and frankly I expect more from him. If he wants me to believe his asteroid science he could start by showing he understands that water cannot cure allergies. If someone who understands science tells me there’s a danger then I’ll worry. If someone who thinks homeopathy is clinically effective tells me there’s a danger then I’ll laugh.

Landlords’ Rights

I realised the other day that while I’ve spent a lot of time criticising other people’s stupid opinions of the smoking ban, I’ve never explicitly put down in writing my own. So here they are, in the form of a response to some more of other people’s.

This blog entry is one of the better ones on what I consider the most opposing side. It makes two main arguments:

Hitler introduced this same policy. It is a fascist policy. It is therefore not the kind of thing an enlightened civilisation ought to be doing.
A bar is no more public space than your house. Anything legal in your house should be legal in a bar.

The first of these I’ve deconstructed many times before and I see no reason to do so again, so I shall merely mention in passing the Slippery Slope Fallacy and the Genetic Fallacy (and maybe Godwin’s Law) and leave it at that.

The second is more interesting, because there’s no real counterargument: it starts with assumptions that are true (smoking is legal on private property; bars are private property) and it follows valid logic and arrives at a conclusion (smoking should be legal in bars). This is a simplification, because there is at least one dubious implicit assumption which I have chosen to ignore. (Also, for the purposes of this discussion I am assuming that the bars in question have no paid employees, perhaps being operated by the owner or owners only, or operating on a very optimistic version of the honour system. Or coin-op beer pumps. Who knows what world the blogger was living in?) But you already know (presumably) that I disagree with this argument’s conclusion, and the inconsistency there is what I want to address.

The argument, you see, is not an argument for or against a ban in principle. It only opposes the idea of a ban that applies to bars but not houses. This argument says you can ban smoking everywhere or nowhere but nothing inbetween.

Personally, if I was forced to choose between those options, I would choose the former, which means that the “landlord’s rights” argument is, as far as I’m concerned, nothing more than a rally to ban smoking in private residences (which, if smokers have children, would seem only reasonable anyway). In any case, smoking is (in real terms, regardless of what this week’s tabloids may say) more dangerous than some drugs which are banned outright, and it clearly is addictive. If we accept our current drugs legislation, it’s hard to argue banning smoking outright would, at least in principle, be any kind of human rights violation. But I wouldn’t advocate such a ban for one simple reason: smokers are addicted to a legal drug. If the government complicitly allowed millions of people to become addicted to a drug, like they did with tobacco, and then banned it outright, forcing addicts to either go cold-turkey or break the law, that would be incredibly harsh. So smoking shouldn’t be banned in private residences until many years’ warning has been given (or the number of smokers has dropped to an insignificant level). But after that? Yeah, ban it outright if it seems like it’d help. What good is it anyway?

Lastly, while I’m here, let me just attack another common type of argument. I’ve seen a couple of things lately that have been pretty similar. They say things like “look how many pubs’ profits have fallen already” or “my local pub’s atmosphere has become tense already”. The latter of those was pulled from a letter in The Times. The key word there, to my eyes, is “already”. It is intended to mean “if this is what happens after a month, think how bad it will be in a year!” but the correct interpretation is “this is what happens after a month; it has no bearing on what may happen after a year and is therefore irrelevant.” Think long-term, people. This is more important than a couple of weeks’ weird looks at the bar.

Religious Crackpot Of The Month â€” July 2007: Ceci N’est Pas Un Pope.

The next person who tells me religion forms a basis for morality gets a punch in the face. Well, no, that’s almost certainly not true, but if they do, I feel it will be justified. This month’s Religious Crackpot Of The Month award goes to the entire Vatican, who are increasingly mad and incredibly dangerous.

Religion forms a basis for rules. Rules can be good or bad. But they aren’t morality. It’s not “moral” to be good to avoid burning forever in hell; it’s selfish. It’s not “moral” to obey some rules to gain access to some paradise afterlife; that’s selfish, too. The religious argument, though, says aha, but you see God created the universe and He gets to decide what’s Moral and what’s Immoral. Therefore, it reasons, if you obey the rules God laid down, you will be acting Morally, and if you don’t, you won’t.

This is slightly stupid, because there’s no actual logical connection between creating the universe and morality. You can’t get from one to the other. It’s also stupid because the rules that religions preach now are, even if we’re generous and grant religion the rather absurd assumption that whoever they believe vreated the universe actually did write their holy books, nothing like the originals. They’re not God’s Word; they’re Chinese Whispers.

Evolution doesn’t favour the most accurate forms, or the most true or the nicest. It favours the ones that survive best. And evolution is an inevitable consequence of any system that allows something to mutate, reproduce, and pass changes onto its offspring. So when a book is copied out, changes are introduced in every generation. When a religion is passed on by word of mouth, changes are introduced. When a text is translated, errors creep in. and all these little changes add up over time, and eventually you end up not with the an accurate reflection of any original work, God’s word or otherwise, but with a very powerful meme which is very good at getting itself passed on, very good at deflecting argument, and very good at sticking in your brain. There is no requirement at all for it to do anything else, so generally it doesn’t.

Of course, it will always keep something moral back, like “Thou Shalt Not Kill”. But not because it’s “moral” or “right” or “God’s Word”. It’s because that’s a good survival trait — it allows people to say things like “this idea forms a basis for morality; look, it preaches not killing”. Big whoop. So does Shazanity.

But I can forgive all that. You can believe that, and I won’t think less of you. It’s very hard to break out of something like religion, and some people get enough support and happiness out of theirs that it might not be a good idea anyway. They’re in a symbiotic relationship with the viral meme that is their religion. What I really don’t understand is Roman Catholics.

Now, as I understand this, and I used to be one and now I have a keen interest in them so I like to think I know at least as much about Catholicism as the average Catholic, a Roman Catholic is basically the same as any other Christian except that in addition to the Bible, they also believe a whole stack of other dogma churned out be the Vatican. For example, they have to believe that God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit are simultaneously three distinct entities and one single entity. This creates a problem, because if you apply set theory, which I’m given to understand is ultimately the root of all mathematics, then you can start from that premise and prove quite trivially that three equals one*. (Mathematics is important to Catholicism because without it Pope Pius I was the same person as Pope Pius III, and that’s just confusing.) So Catholics also have to believe a second bit of dogma brought in later, which explains it away as a “Strict Mystery”. A Strict Mystery is one that is so mysterious, it’s impossible to understand unless you’re God (or an idiot). This, of course, makes no sense either, and doesn’t really explain anything at all even if you assume it’s true, but that’s okay, because it itself could be a Strict Mystery.

And they you have Limbo. Now Limbo is very confusing. It was widely publicised a bit ago that the latest Pope, who was a Nazi, abolished Limbo, the traditional resting place of unbaptised babies. This meant that all good Catholics who read this had to immediately stop believing in Limbo. But it had been publicised weeks before that he was going to do that, so what were Catholics supposed to believe in the meantime? But the worst part of this is that these reports aren’t true. In real life, the new Pope, who wasn’t really a Nazi, issued a Papal Bull to the effect that Limbo may or may not exist. The Vatican doesn’t know, because the Bible doesn’t say, and of course anything that the Bible doesn’t mention may or may not be true and you can’t prove it, because only the Bible is proof of anything. (You know, the Bible, or anything the Vatican says, because of Papal Infallibility, which was introduced by the Vatican in– hang on.)

But that’s the point: it’s all just rules. Rules don’t define morality. And as if proof were needed, here it is.

This blogger is rather understandably annoyed because not only did some bastard kill two employees of an abortion clinic in the name of his religious “morality”, but now there is a group of people who frankly are at least as bad intent on worshipping him as a hero and re-enacting the murders. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, we now have to put up with the Vatican asking all Catholics to boycott Amnesty International. Why? Because they think women should, in some situations, be allowed abortions.

(Now, far be it for me to apply common sense to any of this, but it would seem to me that if aborted foetuses go to Limbo, where they get “natural happiness”, that’s not so very bad. Frankly it’s probably better than most of them would get if they lived a normal life and God Judged them. Really, abortions are selfless acts, with one doctor accepting an eternity in Hell to save a load of foetuses.)

But more to the point, what may or may not happen to foetuses, or for that matter, people, after they die is something of a mystery. It’s really impossible to know, at least, not when you’re alive. What happens in Iraq to people very shortly before they die is a matter of well documented fact. And anyone who read the excellent article in the Times should know what happens in Guantanamo Bay. Amnesty fight these causes, and need money to do that, but the Vatican just mindlessly applies a bunch of rules it invented to everything, with no common sense or compromise or thought of any kind. They spot Amnesty going even slightly against one of those made-up rules and they immediately announce that all the extra suffering, totrure and killings it will cause don’t matter and that all that matters is that Catholics teach Amnesty that God is not to be fucked with. It shouldn’t need stating that boycotting a charity aimed at, and successful in, preserving and standing up for human rights, based on your flimsy interpretation of a book written centuries ago claiming to be the work of God is an utterly abhorrent way to behave. (The same applies to the whole condoms-are-bad-oh-no-AIDS debacle.)

This week, the same Pope has just made an announcement that non-Catholic churches are somehow “not proper churches”. This means, logically, that non-Catholic denominations of Christianity aren’t proper Christianity. Naturally, that’s what Catholics would believe anyway, at some level, so we’ve learned nothing from this but it has still made people angry. Why did he say that? What use was it? Sometimes I think hegoes looking for a fight.

I generally allow religion its follies because they are harmless and because it’s just easier that way. But a number of people who are very important to me are heavily involved in Amnesty, and a number of other people who are also very important to me are Catholics. So I’m rather forced to form an opinion. And my opinion, or rather, the plain simple fact of the matter, is that whether or not Amnesty is right, the Vatican is wrong. So here’s the deal: anybody who refuses to support Amnesty because it conflict with their Catholic beliefs is no longer my friend. It really is that simple. I’m not, as a rule, friends with people who behave abhorrently. If you find yourself in that category, do not attempt to change my mind. Attempt to change your own mind, because it is your mind which is defective. (Anybody who considers themselves a Catholic but finds themselves forced to disagree with things the Vatican says probably ought to take a long look and decide if they are then, by any reasonable definition, a Catholic, or just a Christian whose nearest church happens to be a Catholic one.)

But I’m not going to sit there in conversations any more and act as if this kind of thing is okay. The next person who tells me they are a Catholic is going to get asked if they support Amnesty. Because it’s the difference between “I like to wear white clothes and have bonfires” and “I am a member of the Klan”.

*First,define a set of the father, the son and the holy spirit. This has a cardinality of one. Then one-to-one map it directly to the set of Chipmunks (Alvin, Simon, Theodore) which has a cardinality of three. This proves one equals three. Apparently.