Movie Friday: Tim Wise and the illusion of “post-racial”

I am depressed.

I am depressed for two reasons. First, I am depressed that no matter how hard I work, I will likely never get as good at talking about issues of race and racism, history and the importance of advocacy as Tim Wise is:

The second reason I am depressed is that it seems like the forces of reason are losing the fight to the forces of revisionist history, post-hoc rationalization and short-sighted self-interest. I realize this post is much longer than what I usually post for Movie Friday (and has fewer jokes), but if you’ve found any of my posts on “the good old days” or the importance of recognizing black history, or really anything that I’ve said about race to be interesting (and the numbers suggest that at least some of you do), then you’ll absolutely love this clip.

Any of you who have watched any black beat poetry or other forms of spoken word, you’ll recognize that Tim uses a lot of their cadence and punctuated rhythm to get his points across. It’s not just a lecture – it’s verbal poetry. Amazing stuff, and I really really hope you watch it.

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Conservative Party of Canada is against science

There is a surefire way to ensure tyranny – undermine the education of the populace. When the people don’t have the tools required to determine truth from lies or to obtain their information from a variety of sources, they become dependent on the state to tell them “the Truth™”. We can see this currently happening in the Arab world, where state television in Libya is still being used to broadcast misinformation that is (perhaps fatally) undermining the cause of the pro-democracy rebellion.

One way to ensure a religious tyranny is to ensure that the populace doesn’t have access to adequate scientific information. Science is inherently hostile to religion, since the two are very different methods at arriving at answers. The scientific method involves testing repeated observations and inferring rules and laws from trends within those observations. The religious method involves arriving at a conclusion and then finding observations that support the a priori position. The problem with the latter method is that it is trivially easy to arrive at false conclusions and then justify them afterward. By ensuring that the public doesn’t have access to scientific knowledge, you can erode the cause of science and replace it with whatever system you like.

Enter the Conservative Party of Canada:

The public has lost free online access to more than a dozen Canadian science journals as a result of the privatization of the National Research Council’s government-owned publishing arm. Scientists, businesses, consultants, political aides and other people who want to read about new scientific discoveries in the 17 journals published by National Research Council Research Press now either have to pay $10 per article or get access through an institution that has an annual subscription.

Now this on its own is an incredibly minor development. The vast majority of people who access the scientific literature are scientists working at institutions that can afford to buy subscriptions. Furthermore, the lay public get most of their scientific information from people who interpret the studies that are now behind a paywall, so most people won’t notice the difference. This is not the straw that breaks the camel’s back by any stretch of the imagination.

However, erosion doesn’t work in giant leaps – it occurs gradually over time. One of the strengths of science is the ability of anyone who is curious to go back and investigate the source material. Someone tells you that a drug works to treat diabetes, you can go to the paper and check it for yourself. Someone tells you that homeopathy cures warts, you can go check it out for yourself. Someone tells you that the universe was created in the Big Bang, you can go read the papers. This process encourages skepticism and critical thinking, while increasing the trust that the public has in the scientific community (by increasing transparency).

By placing additional barriers between lay Canadians and the products of Canadian scientific researchers, the privatization of the National Research Council is inherently anti-transparent and anti-science. It discourages scientific scrutiny and question-asking, which are two things that the CPC really doesn’t like in the first place. If Harper can’t get a majority right now, at least he can do as much damage as possible with the limited powers he wields.

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Flirting with free speech

There’s an interesting wrinkle in the debate over free speech, which has to do with the issue of truth. If I say that Stephen Harper is the worst Prime Minister we’ve ever had, that falls under the category of political criticism and opinion, which is protected speech. However, if I say that Stephen Harper raped a 12 year-old girl in 1997, that falls under the auspices of defamation and is punishable under law (where I would have to produce some evidence or face a legal repercussion). Both of these things are reasonable statutes – while we should be allowed to criticize our political leaders (and each other), it would certainly be harmful to society as a whole if people were allowed to level damaging accusations at each other without restraint.

There is, however, a large middle ground where the line between these two things blurs. If I say, for example, that Stephen Harper seems to me like a guy who would rape a 12 year-old child, that’s still my opinion, but it’s definitely defamatory. What if someone tells me that they heard that Stephen Harper did something like that, and I repeat their lie based on faulty information? Is that my fault? What if I am a prominent public figure? Does my position as an opinion leader impart on me some responsibility to check into the factuality of claims that I make before I repeat them?

What about if instead of being a singular opinion leader, I am a news organization? Do I have a duty, both to the public and to the rule of law, to ensure that the things that I report are based in fact? The CRTC seems to think so:

The CRTC has withdrawn a controversial proposal that would have given TV and radio stations more leeway to broadcast false or misleading news. Indeed, the broadcast regulator now says it never wanted the regulatory change in the first place and was only responding to orders from a parliamentary committee. The committee last week quietly withdrew its request for regulatory amendments in the face of a public backlash.

The CRTC has been in the news quite a bit recently for its approach to telecommunications, the Fox News North issue, and now once again for its withdrawal of its own proposal over false news.

There are two issues to consider with this move. First, it is notoriously difficult to establish a standard for “truth” outside the realm of science. If we look at what is happening in Libya right now, it is both a populist uprising against a brutal dictator, and a band of anti-government rebels using unlawful force against the legitimate ruler of the country. Both of those completely contradictory claims are completely true, depending on the editorial position one takes. How could one determine which of these claims, if made from a media outlet, would be considered “false or misleading”? Are the Democrats in Wisconsin bravely refusing to capitulate to an over-reaching and clearly corrupt governor, or are they fleeing the legitimate government and abdicating the legislative role they vowed to uphold? Again, these are both completely true claims, and if station A adheres to the first, while station B trumpets the second, which one is lying? Both? Neither?

The second issue to keep in mind is that, thus far, this has never been an issue in Canada. The CRTC has never had to prosecute or fine a television or radio station for broadcasting false or misleading news. There’s a great diversity of opinion among the various outlets, save for the fact that we don’t have an outlet that specifically caters to the bizarro-nut right wing (we also don’t have one that caters specifically to the bizarro-nut left wing, if that helps). It’s a sort of non-issue that, if the CRTC is to be believed, was raised about 10 years ago (before the days of the Harper government) and was quietly shelved for most of that time. Given that there’s never been a challenge to the ruling, it’s hard to claim that this is an unreasonable restriction of free speech.

These two issues aside, there is still an underlying conflict at the centre of free speech when it comes to truth. Since truth is always a shifting target outside of science, banning false or misleading news is a tricky issue. By any objective standard of truth that we could agree on as a society, religious statements are all false and misleading, as are ghost stories and UFO sightings. Clearly we are not comfortable banning those statements. What do we do when someone does make a blatantly false claim in a news outlet, given that we have no precedent? While we can trumpet “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” until the cows come home, can we turn that into a general rule for the state to follow? Or must we let the liars continue to lie, with our only recourse being to counter their false speech with true speech?

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Well that’s good to know…

Hey Jews! Good news for you guys? Remember how generations of Catholic leaders said that you were collectively responsible for a murder that supposedly happened 2000 years ago? Pope Ratzinger is letting y’all off the hook:

A new book by Pope Benedict XVI offers a sweeping exoneration of the Jewish people for the death of Jesus Christ, tackling one of the most controversial issues in Christianity. Wednesday, Benedict uses a biblical and theological analysis to explain why it is not true that the Jewish people as a whole were responsible for Jesus’ death. Interpretations to the contrary have been used for centuries to justify the persecution of Jews

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am no friend to the current pope, but I will always give credit where credit is due. First of all, it should be very clear that this is not a new pronouncement from the current administration that reverses Church policy. Jews were let off the hook for the murder of Jesus many years ago, and Church doctrine has been clear about that fact. Reminding Catholics of this fact is a positive step, and hopefully will help stem the tide of anti-Jewish sentiment around the world, at least from Catholics. There is nothing negative to be said about this announcement, which is simply an excerpt of a much longer work by the pope.

Having said all that, it is still a stupid thing to have to say. A group of people cannot be collectively responsible for the actions of a few of their ancestors. The very idea is ludicrous. First of all, there are strong reasons to doubt that the account of Jesus’ trial and execution is anywhere near accurate, or that Jesus as a single person even existed at all. Second, even granting the accuracy of the collective account in the New Testament, some of the Jews in the crowd were trying to secure Jesus’ freedom, a good many of them knew nothing about the case at all, and still thousandsfold more weren’t anywhere near Jerusalem at the time and couldn’t have done anything about it even if they wanted to. Third, even if they were responsible, Jesus’ death was part of the original plan of God, so their involvement was pre-ordained. Fourth and perhaps most importantly, the decisions of a group of people do not carry forward to their offspring. It is only the most profoundly evil mind that could possibly punish a child for the sins of its forebears (yes, apparently that is how the word is spelled).

I should, at this moment, attempt to stem the tide of “aha!” accusations from those who think that the above paragraph also applies to the issue of reparations, affirmative action, or white privilege. Reparations were a promise made on behalf of the Union government, which still exists as the United States government – promises made should be kept. Affirmative action is not punishing white people for the sins of their forebears, and I have explained in depth why this is so. White privilege refers to the fact that children of white parents start their lives with a set of assumptions that benefit them (or at least do not count against them) from day one, which means that they continue to benefit from the actions of their ancestors – Jews are afforded no such benefit, and are usually detrimentally treated for their religious/cultural affiliation (except within their own in-group, obviously).

It is perhaps not unique to religion, this punishing of children for things that their parents did, but it is certainly a hallmark of religious teaching. The doctrine of original sin, for example, is based on the slight disobedience of a fictional ancestor, and punishment is meted out against not only the species supposedly involved in the transgression, but against all other species as well. The Old Testament is replete with examples of innocents being punished for the actions of others. The Qu’ran treats nonbelief with torture – nonbelief which is surely the fault of whatever religious instruction one receives (unwittingly) as a child. Hinduism states that entire families are forever cursed to live as subservient to others based on nothing more than ancestry. The idea that guilt is a heritable trait is certainly one that, if it does not find its authorship there, certainly finds succor and support from theology.

The pope, by declaring that each individual Jewish person in the world is not responsible for the torture and murder of a person who a) may never have existed, b) even if he was, did not experience universal persecution at the hands of Jewish people, c) even if he did, whose persecution and execution were part of a divine plan… by declaring that this is not the fault of their two millennia distant descendants, the pope has basically come to the same realization that a normal and non-god-blinded person would have reached in about 5 minutes of reflection (if they were distracted). To treat this announcement as some kind of mercy or generous gesture is to grant license to the series of fallacies that the idea of deferred transgenerational responsibility requires to carry any force, not to mention the deep and abiding evil that is inherent in the idea of punishing someone for what someone else has done.

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You finished cleaning that glass ceiling yet, sweetheart?

Today is the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day, which should be some cause for celebration. After all, 100 years of progress is an incredibly long time in human history. In the past 100 years we moved from horse-drawn carriages and plows to an international space station orbiting the planet. In 100 years we went from a largely-illiterate population with extremely limited access to information to a planet-wide network that puts virtually the sum total of all human knowledge at ready access from something that we can slip into our pockets. Our understanding of the universe has gone from the deterministic passage of small particles to a nuanced, varied and complex probabilistic model, allowing us to probe concepts previously written off as unsolvable “mysteries”.

Surely in all that time, with all that progress, we’ve made similar strides in the way we treat each other. The answer, as always, seems to be “yes and no”.

Why Feminism Still Matters:

Across the globe by almost every measure, women lag well behind men. Even though women do 66 per cent of the work and produce half of the food, UNICEF reports that they earn only 10 per cent of the global income and own just one per cent of the property. Nowhere in the world do women account for even a third of the national parliamentarians and, in most regions, including Canada, it is considerably less.

Still, this represents progress.

This article, published in the Vancouver Sun, is a pretty decent overview of the various stalls and starts of the movement for women’s equality, but it doesn’t do an explicit job of answering the question implied by its own title – why does feminism still matter? Why should we be focusing on issues that affect women? Anti-feminists, in their attempts to resemble reasonable and decent human beings (rather than reactionary dicks) often refute the feminist position by arguing that we should focus on having equal rights for everyone, and that focusing on women is the same as ignoring men. And while feminists sometimes just want to scream “men are doing just fine, shut your face hole!”, that’s a quick way to lose an argument for a stupid reason.

Canadian companies lack strategies for promoting women:

In the U.S., 70 per cent of companies surveyed lacked strategies for promoting women, compared to 71 per cent internationally. Despatie noted that the Canadian survey also showed that 43 per cent of companies didn’t feel they had a problem with promoting women to top jobs. To women, however, the lack of support strategies was clear. More than half (53 per cent) of all Canadian women and about 38 per cent of American women thought their organization provided “no or minimal support” for their promotion.

It’s right here that the importance of feminism is revealed: companies think they’re doing an excellent job promoting women, but the reality is that they are even worse here than they are in the United States, a place that we’re all happy to look down on socially (to my great chagrin). When there is such a huge gap between perception and reality, the status quo becomes deeply entrenched and progress becomes next to impossible. I am somewhat reminded of the bromide from Alcoholics Anonymous – the first step is admitting you have a problem.

When confronted with this kind of information, the usual reaction of the anti-feminists is to go with the old standby excuse of “maybe there aren’t enough qualified women for the positions”. To me that seems to invite the question: why the hell aren’t there? Women are statistically better educated, are supposedly guaranteed by law to be free from official discrimination based on sex, and equally intelligent as their male counterparts – wherefore the disparity?

Women are underutilized in executive workforce – study:

In both years, a full 30 per cent of the largest companies in Canada did not have a single woman in their executive ranks. “Time is up for ‘give it time’,” Gillis said, though she added that the solution is not simple tokenism. Research indicates that on average, companies with more women senior officers outperform those with fewer (emphasis mine).

That agrees very much with what one of Canada’s largest companies has found in its efforts to reduce the homogeneity of its executive ranks. “If you start to see it as one versus the other, you miss the point,” TD Bank CEO Ed Clark said of the bank’s efforts to promote more women in a recent CBC interview. “By framing it as a people development issue, you don’t get this zero-sum game; everybody wins.”

More and more we are finding that the stereotypical underperformance of women in “men’s fields” like sciences and mathematics are a product of the stereotypes, and not due to any actual difference in cognitive ability. Tearing down stereotypes is a process that requires the intentional encouragement of cognitive dissonance – creating highly visible and immediately recognizable violations of the stereotype. Faced with observed reality and “what I’ve always heard”, reality wins out in the end. Add to that the fact that encouraging women appears to have beneficial outcomes above and beyond being the right thing to do, and you’ve got the recipe for a winner.

(There is an important fact raised in that article that doesn’t fit the overall theme of the argument, but I thought it should be raised anyway. While Crown corporations had the largest proportion of women in executive positions, the private sector came in second place, a number that has increased slightly in the past 2 years. It appears that the private sector is doing a better job of promoting women than the public sector. Just food for thought.)

The premier-designate is a woman:

It may not be kosher to discuss the premier-designate (Christy Clark) in terms of her sex, given we are conditioned to believe that a person’s capability has nothing to do with gender, but it’s clearly a factor, because when it comes to positions of power, whether it’s Parliament Hill or a corporate boardroom, a skirt is still an anomaly in Canada.

And it is relevant. The majority of the population is female, and yet women remain woefully under-represented at the top -be it by historical choice or entrenched sexism. Women, despite making up the bulk of the workforce, are still traditionally considered custodians of the home and hearth and, as such, are often viewed as weaker than men, slower to decision and less likely to be strong political leaders who will go the distance.

My home province of British Columbia (or at least those who are registered members of the provincial Liberal party) recently appointed a new leader… and it’s a lady! If you scratch the surface of the image of the B.C. granola hippie yoga hipster, you’ll find that B.C. is still a western province with deep entrenched Conservative (note the capitalization) values. It is indeed, therefore, a big deal that the person with her finger on the button is a “her”. Despite the fact that the provincial Liberals would pass for Conservatives just about anywhere else in the country, a female premier (designate) is just the kind of high-profile stereotype-busting position I was talking about, and I wish premier-designate Clark success.

Ivory Coast women protesters shot:

Soldiers backing Ivory Coast’s defiant leader mowed down women protesting his refusal to leave power in a hail of gunfire Thursday, killing at least six and shocking a nation where women’s marches have historically been used as a last resort against an unrestrained army. Because the president’s security force has shown almost no reserve in opening fire on unarmed civilians, the women decided this week to organize the march in the nation’s commercial capital Abidjan, assuming soldiers would be too ashamed to open fire. But at least six of the thousands of women demonstrating Thursday were killed on the spot, said Mohamed Dosso, an assistant to the mayor of Abobo, a suburb of the city.

Women bring another set of sensibilities to the table when discussing issues, and a diversity of viewpoints is a strength. Whatever the final decision, having a plurality of insight allows decision-making authorities to consider a variety of potential outcomes. In the Ivory Coast, women have traditionally exercised a different kind of power to their male counterparts, and have been able to blunt the more outrageous actions of a male-dominated culture. Their execution by the army signals a disturbing new development in an already-disturbing conflict.

Closing thoughts

Which brings me back to the question I tried to address earlier: why does feminism still matter?

Well, do women experience disproportionately little political and economic power? Is the improvement of the standing of women irrevocably linked to the improvement of society in general? Have gains been made? Is there still work to do?

The answer to all of the above questions is “yes”. We are not yet, as a society, in a position to let feminism slide into history as obsolete. While I am primarily a commentator on race and associated issues, I am not so blind as to fail to recognize that the same societal forces that are stacked against black people are stacked against women. A victory for women is a victory for all of us, and there can be no equality until we see the advancement of women as being part of our own self-interest. In order to achieve that, people need to be talking about it.

Happy International Women’s Day.

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Divine mercy: an allegory

Gary woke with no memory of what had happened. Slowly, fighting the urge to retch, he opened his eyes. He immediately regretted doing so, as daggers of light from a single exposed overhead lightbulb pierced through his half-lidded vision and ignited the cobwebs in his head. Raising a hand to block the offending rays, Gary became aware that he was lying naked on a hard concrete floor in a bare room. A grim-looking man with unfamiliar features stood by a solid-looking metal door. Seeing that Gary was awake, the man grunted, heaved the door open, and walked into the hallway outside, letting the door slam behind him.

“Hello?” Gary called querulously. There was no answer. Staggering to his feet, Gary steadied himself against the cold concrete wall and shook his head, trying to dispel the last of his confusion. He lurched toward the door on unsteady feet and wrenched on the knob, to no avail. Gary slammed his open palm against the door and heard a dull boom sound that was quickly absorbed into the walls and high ceiling. “Hello!” he called again “Let me out of here!”

His hand slapped the door again, eliciting the same sound and lack of response from anyone who might be listening. Gary tugged against the knob again then, his small reserve of energy spent, slumped back to the floor. Frantically, he searched his memory hoping to reveal some clue of where he was, how he had arrived there, and who or what he might have offended to deserve such treatment. Suddenly, the door  made a sharp *click* and the knob turned. Gary scrambled to his feet and backed away from the door, imagining that he might be able to make a dash through the portal once whoever was on the other side opened it.

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As in all things, context is key

I don’t usually double-post on Mondays (I find it uncouth), but there was so much to talk about this week that I felt it necessary to hit you with two shots of the good stuff every day this week (don’t worry, Friday is still for movies only, and I have a great one for you this time around).

If I can, I will commiserate with my conservative brethren for a moment: it is often incredibly difficult to know the right thing to say when discussing race, and sometimes people’s reactions can seem overly sensitive. The fact that their reactions always seem overly sensitive to you is because you haven’t bothered to try and understand why, but that’s your issue to deal with. Two stories came to my attention this week that I thought were good illustrations of when even your humble narrator found it difficult to pick a side.

Beyoncé raises some eyebrows with her makeup choice

For the 90th anniversary of French fashion mag, L’Officiel Paris, Beyonce Knowles appears in a pictorial which pays tribute to an “African Queen” theme. More specifically, Knowles channels Fela Kuti, a Nigerian musician and human rights activist who supposedly inspired the music on her upcoming album.

Is this going where you think it is?

Ayup!

Beyoncé has dressed in what could accurately be described as “blackface” for a photo shoot. Now as I’ve said before, blackface has a history in the United States that is connected to buffoonery and the outright mockery of black people. It would be incredibly difficult to make that connection here – Ms. Knowles is going out of her way to pay tribute to the cultural history of Nigeria, which is about as far from mockery as you can get. She is also simultaneously wedding dark skin with the idea of beauty and power – a positive image, especially considering the dearth of dark-skinned models of colour in fashion today. It would be ludicrous to accuse her of “blackening up” in the same tradition of a minstrel show.

However, there is another side to this issue. Firstly, Ms. Knowles is fair-skinned, a fact which has earned her her fair share of criticism. With her straightened hair (often dyed blonde) and her status as a sex symbol, Beyoncé’s image is that of having “good hair” and “good skin”, which does no favours to her dark-complected sisters. After the shoot is over, Beyoncé gets to wash the makeup off and reclaim her status as being light-skinned (and anyone who thinks that doesn’t make a difference is woefully out of touch). It is not so for someone whose skin is naturally that hue – they’re always dark. Additionally, it is not necessary to the shoot that Ms. Knowles darken her skin – the image could be conveyed just as convincingly with the cheek makeup and the clothing. The makeup seems completely extraneous, and suggests to me that she is trying to convey some kind of additional message about dark skin. What that message is is subject to interpretation, and I will not speculate.

Professor retires over racial remarks

A longtime Murray State University professor has decided to retire after referring to slavery while making a point about tardiness to two black students last semester, the school said Friday. “I did say, ‘Do you know why you were late? There’s a theory that a way to protest their master’s treatment was for slaves to be late.’

The newspaper reported that according to Johnson’s official complaint, when she asked (professor) Wattier what he meant, he replied: “It is part of your heritage. The slaves never showed up on time to their owners and were lashed for it. I just don’t have the right to do that.”

Yeah… that was a stupid thing to say. The original remark was bad enough on its own, but the elaboration was the nail in the coffin.

As with the “blackface” issue above, this is one of those situations in which context is crucial. I do not doubt professor Wattier’s assertions that he is not a dispositionally racist person. Testimony from his colleagues reveals him to have many connections to the black community stretching back many years. However, the fact remains that a while professor comparing his black students to slaves and lamenting his inability to humiliate and punish them in the way that their ancestors (possibly – the students may not have had slaves for forebearers) would have experienced is inexcusable.

It’s remarkable how easy it is to bring the pain of historical mistreatment to the surface. One misplaced word, an off-hand comment, an inadvertent (or completely innocently-intended) reference can expose the scars of the past almost instantaneously. It is for this reason that I continually go out of my way to extend the benefit of the doubt to those who say racially insensitive things. However, I will not excuse that ignorance, nor will I ever let an opportunity for education pass. I certainly have no interest in “calming down” or “getting over it”, as is the common refrain whenever anyone points out the effect of unintended or historical racism. We all make mistakes – it is those who are willing to learn from them that will make sure they become more rare.

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Thou shalt NOT believe

One of the more tedious and bizarrely inaccurate straw men that anti-secularists like to pin on secular advocates is that we want to take people’s religion away from them. Having established this completely untrue assertion, they trot out the shopworn examples of people like Pol Pot, Joseph Stalin, and Adolph Hitler. While atheists often counter that Hitler was a Catholic, that Stalin created a new religion based on worship of the state, and that Pol Pot created a cult of personality centred on himself – hardly non-religious actions – I think that this response grants far too much credence to the complete lack of merit present in the assertion.

There is a world of difference between the kind of mandatory atheism that were attempted in Cambodia, Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany and the kind of state atheism that is proposed by secularists. The first is an attempt at thought control – criminalizing certain types of beliefs as being non-harmonious with the interest of the state and punishing any kind of expression of those beliefs. The second is the prescription of a stance toward religion by the state – a refusal to recognize the supremacy of any supernatural belief as worthy of state sanction. The difference between these two positions is akin to the difference between eating at a vegetarian restaurant and murdering anyone who’s ever had a hamburger (albeit inverted – and I’m not likely to do either).

As a committed secularist (not to mention a decent, feeling person) I am an ardent supporter of the principle of freedom of conscience and belief. The punishment of thoughtcrime was, for me, one of the most chilling aspects of Orwell’s masterpiece 1984 – one did not even have to do something to merit punishment; one only had to betray a thought that didn’t meet official approval and one was subject to torture. Hand in hand with the idea of freedom of conscience must be freedom of expression – to me, the most important and least negotiable of the fundamental human freedoms. Every human person has the right to be sovereign in her/his own head, and should be allowed to civilly discuss and disagree with even our most closely-held ideals – it is the only path toward freedom and progress.

If this wasn’t a compelling enough reason to oppose the caricature of secularism that is mandatory state-sponsored atheism, there’s also the fact that it doesn’t work:

One of the last great efforts at state-sponsored atheism is a failure. And not just any kind of failure. China has enforced its anti-religion policy through decades of repression, coercion and persecution, but the lack of success is spectacular, according to a major new study. No more than 15 percent of adults in the world’s most populous country are “real atheists;” 85 percent of the Chinese either hold some religious beliefs or practice some kind of religion, according to the Chinese Spiritual Life Survey.

Members of the Chinese Communist Party and Youth League are required to be atheists, yet 17 percent of them self-identified with a religion, and 65 percent indicated they had engaged in religious practices in the last year, reported sociologist Fenggang Yang of Purdue University, a lead researcher in the project.

What’s interesting is that a place like China, which has been officially anti-theist for more than a generation, has much higher rates of religious belief than places like Denmark or Sweden (or even my homeland of Vancouver), with their strictly secular attitudes toward religion. It somewhat reminds me of a poem I read on a bus in Toronto about two dogs who strain at the leash, yearning for freedom, until the leash is removed. The dogs, newly freed, are content to stay where they were. Of course, in this example, religion is closer to a leash than it is to freedom, but mandatory atheism is not much preferable to state religion.

Defenders of the faith will be quick to seize upon results like the ones found in the study as evidence to support the conjecture that faith is an organic part of being human – that our brains are “wired” to believe in some kind of god. These results do not show any such thing. I’m more inclined to believe that if there is any connection between brains and faith, it is that we have a tendency to invent explanations for strange phenomena, irrespective of how plausible those explanations are (bump in the night? must be a ghost). What they do suggest is that religion cannot be abolished by simply making it illegal.

Personally I am relieved to know that mandatory atheism in China isn’t working. Compelling people to hold a certain belief is an immensely evil act, whether that belief is religious or anti-religious. While it’s disappointing that people are turning toward religion, China is a place that places great value in ancient wisdom and tradition as opposed to science and reason. Atheism is the result of a refusal to accept antiquity and authority as legitimate paths to truth – once those props are gone, religious and other supernatural beliefs are left without anything to hold them up. This is not a process that can be forced on someone; only encouraged.

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I now have a bit of a crush on Greta Christina

I hope that she won’t take that the wrong way. I do not mean to demean, but I do want to take her brain out to dinner and a walk along the seawall. Why? Because she wrote this:

But it’s disingenuous at best, hypocritical at worst, to say that criticism of other religious beliefs is inherently bigoted and offensive… and then make an exception for beliefs that are opposed to your own. You don’t get to speak out about how hard-line extremists are clearly getting Christ’s message wrong (or Mohammad’s, or Moses’, or Buddha’s, or whoever) — and then squawk about religious intolerance when others say you’re the one getting it wrong. That’s just not playing fair.

And, of course, it’s ridiculously hypocritical to engage in fervent political and cultural discourse — as so many progressive ecumenical believers do — and then expect religion to get a free pass. It’s absurd to accept and even welcome vigorous public debate over politics, science, medicine, economics, gender, sexuality, education, the role of government, etc… and then get appalled and insulted when religion is treated as just another hypothesis about the world, one that can be debated and criticized like any other.

In her piece entitled No, Atheists Don’t Have to Show “Respect” for Religion, she hits the ball out of the park in identifying the complete lack of merit in the position of “everyone’s entitled to their opinion“, the topic of one of my very first thought pieces. She really tickles all of my skeptical pleasure-centres when she writes stuff like this:

In my debates and discussions with religious believers, there’s a question I’ve asked many times: “Do you care whether the things you believe are true?” And I’m shocked at how many times I’ve gotten the answer, “No, not really.” It leaves me baffled, practically speechless. (Hey, I said “practically.”) I mean, even leaving out the pragmatic fails and the moral and philosophical bankruptcy of prioritizing pleasantry over reality… isn’t it grossly disrespectful to the God you supposedly believe in? If you really loved God, wouldn’t you want to understand him as best you can? When faced with different ideas about God, wouldn’t you want to ask some questions, and look at the supporting evidence for the different views, and try to figure out which one is probably true? Doesn’t it seem incredibly insulting to God to treat that question as if it didn’t really matter?

There are profound differences between different religions. They are not trivial. And the different religions cannot all be right. (Although, as atheists like to point out, they can all be wrong.) Jesus cannot both be and not be the son of God. God cannot be both an intentional, sentient being and a diffuse supernatural force animating all life. God cannot be both a personal intervening force in our daily lives and a vague metaphorical abstraction of the concepts of love and existence. Dead people cannot both go to heaven and be reincarnated. Etc. Etc. Etc.

When faced with these different ideas, are you really going to shrug your shoulders, and say “My, how fascinating, look at all these different ideas, isn’t it amazing how many ways people have of seeing God, what a magnificent tapestry of faith humanity has created”?

Do you really not care which of these ideas is, you know, true?

Read the whole article, but be prepared for the need to sneak off to enjoy some “personal time” afterwards.

 

Please don’t be… aww crap

There’s a phenomenon in the black community, whenever someone sees a headline like this:

Man, 21, arrested for drug possession and assault

We immediately flinch and say “Please please please don’t be a black guy.” It’s a reaction to the fact that, nearly without exception, whenever a black man makes the news it’s because he’s a gang-banger arrested for some crime. The problem is that this event reflects such a small proportion of the black population, and yet the fallout is something we all must deal with. We are all tagged with the crime, as our culture unconsciously (in most cases) links the man’s skin colour to his propensity to commit crime. As a result, I get distrustful looks from old ladies when walking the streets at night, and am assumed to be the one in my group of friends who sells drugs.

I’d imagine that Christians are starting to get an appreciation for that phenomenon when they see headlines like this one:

Charity chief convicted of sexual assault

Given the number of Christian organizations, leaders and celebrities that have been exposed doing decidedly un-Christlike things in the past little while, you’ve got to imagine that Christians are more than a little concerned every time someone makes the news for doing something really evil.

I guess we can both say “oh shit” in unison:

The head of two Toronto-area organizations that were stripped of their charitable status after submitting “falsified” documents to federal regulators was sentenced this month for sexual assault for inappropriately touching a teenager, CBC News has learned. Daniel Mokwe was sentenced Jan. 13 to time served — two nights in jail — and given two years probation.

The victim, a minor at the time of the assault, told Det. Richard Petrie of the Toronto Police Service that she knew Mokwe was a pastor. As a result of the incident, she lost her faith in God and would never enter another church again, she said.

Yep, he’s black and Christian. His “charity organization”, Revival Time Ministries (which sounds like a children’s television program on a god-bothering channel) had its licensed revoked after Canada Revenue (the Canadian equivalent to the IRS) found a series of irregularities in their bookkeeping. Mokwe had another charity called “Save Canada’s Teenagers” – the irony should not be lost on anyone.

If I were a lesser blogger, I could score a few cheap points off of pointing out that Jesus didn’t keep Mokwe from being both financially and sexually corrupted, and that this is “proof” that Christianity is just as empty as all religions. I think the point to be made here is larger than that one though. Daniel Mokwe is undoubtedly a bad person, using the auspices of a charitable organization and his position as an authority figure to abuse both the tax code and, more devastatingly, a young girl. The problem is the source from which Mokwe derives his authority – namely, his position as a pastor. His parishoners, and likely those who donated to him, placed trust in him at least partially based on the fact that he claimed a personal relationship with YahwAlladdha. They essentially granted a portion of the trust that they placed in the deity itself in the hands of a man who told them he is tight with the almighty.

I can’t harp on this issue enough, it seems. The problem is not religion per se. The problem is that we take it seriously. If I told you I had a special insight into a voice in the sky, as revealed through interpretation of Beowulf, you’d (quite rightly) think me a lunatic in need of some therapy. However, if I tell you instead that I am granted authority by Yahweh based on the Bible, all of a sudden my cup doth overflow with credibility. Why? Why do people who claim a particular brand of magical thinking get a free pass into positions of trust? Why indeed, since they seem to have no lesser frequency of violating that trust than someone who is a non-believer?

It is there where the difference between the “don’t let him be black” and the “don’t let him be Christian” arises. Black people don’t claim to be morally superior, or to have a conduit to absolute truth based on the colour of our skin. Christians, however, do claim such superiority. Christianity has been made synonymous with honesty and righteousness over generations, despite all evidence that such association is a big steaming pile of turds. It relies on this borrowed heft of asserted uprightness in order to be made a member of the conversation. Why on Earth would we listen to a bunch of nutjobs who think that the only possible explanation for a woman giving birth without having sex with her husband is that God did it, or who think that a book written by amassing the third-hand account of people who claim to have known a particular Palestinian carpenter decades before the fact is the literal word of the almighty? When evaluating those claims at face value, they can be, and should be, dismissed as nonsense.

As long as we keep re-applying the thin varnish of respect to the rotting woodwork of religion, we will see scam artists like this perpetrate their fraud again and again.

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