AC Grayling gets it bang on re faith group daftness.

[SolidGoldBangers]

There's a pint on the bar for him all right. Good effort.

Oh FFS why is it so impossible to get this point across? Demanding the right to be critical of religions is not the same as wanting to ban them all, and wanting a secular society does not mean stopping people from participating in rituals if they want to; it means not giving extra privileges to the superstitious, such as allowing them to discriminate when such discrimination from people who aren't claiming that they are doing it in the name of the Great Pumpkin would be illegal. (Though it looks like that has just been er, reconsidered by the Government and about time too).
As to the 'nastiness' of religions, come on, name me one that actually considers women equal to men and doesn't have issues with homosexuality and 'unbelievers'. I am not talking about liberal and fair-minded individuals who combine humanistic values with a belief in the supernatural; whatever the faith brand, if you are one of the liberal ones, you are in conflict with a good chunk of your fellow believers on these issues.

Blimey, MrsMH, you've been busy. I agree with you. Especially the bit about how we are all crap whether we follow a faith or not. It's true of course. But because religion is concerned primarily with "being good" and the question of how to be good, religious people are natural targets for accusations of hypocrisy.

If we want to criticise religion, it is so very much more productive to discuss specific acts of hypocrisy or wrongdoing within religious groups. There are plenty of them (just as there are outside religious groups), but it is just dumb to dismiss the entire concept. Like I said before, just because someone shits in the swimming pool it doesn't necessarily mean that swimming pools are a bad idea.

(I too suffered the winner/sinner man at Oxford Circus every day for years. He used to drive me nuts. But really it's nothing compared to the commercial bombardment we suffer all the time now.)

SGB - why should it be surprising that liberal believers should be in disagreement with non-liberal believers? And why would you think that the non-liberal ones somehow represent the religion in a way that the liberal ones don't? It's as though you think that a thick homophobic misogynist somehow has a better understanding of religious values than an educated liberal. Why would you think this? It doesn't make any sense.

for the last bloody time - they are NOT getting extra privileges by having another of 1000's of "advisory" groups set up using them.

Always: Not necessarily, but they are getting extra privilegse when they insist on being given exemption from anti-discrimination laws on the grounds of superstition.

oh so it's ok to discriminate against someone because of their beliefs/or opinions as someone else put it. Superstitions is just down right offensive.

Zeph - quite so, esp your bit about shitting in swimming pools. I do occasionally wonder what happened to Mr Sinner/ Winner, though...and did I mention the time I challenged a loudmouthed, opinionated imam? Oh, dear, why do I get myself into these situations?!

SGB, you asked which religion regards women/ homosexuals as equals/ with respect. I can only speak for my own religion as it's the one I know best. I've actually already answered this question indirectly: when I told slug that she should ask herself not 'why do conservative believers reject women and gays', but 'why do moderate believers accept women and gays'. The answer, I believe, is similar to the answer you would get if you ask this of non-believers. And again I already addressed this several times, when I wrote about personality differences, all people having the propensity for crapness, etc etc.

If someone is bigoted, they are bigoted. They will be bigoted in every context in which they find themselves. They will be bigoted whether they have a faith or not. They will seek information to confirm their bigotry and blank out information which contradicts it. It's a personality thing. Therefore two Christians can look at the same passage of the Bible where it mentions homosexuality or regard for women, and come out with two entirely different interpretations. One will say: 'Well, women in biblical times very much took a secondary role to men and were rarely ever leaders, therefore this is the pattern we will follow today'. The other will say: 'Well, this is very much about the culture of Middle-Eastern life at that time. One could just as well say that Western Christian women in the 21st century all wore skirts with buttons and therefore this is the pattern that everyone should follow.' This is what makes faith a living, breathing entity - it's not about organisations, it's about people and what we bring to our faith. However, there are plumb lines, if you like, which we can use to check ourselves and our chosen interpretations. IMO, if a person's doctrine contradicts the overall message of the Bible, which is about love, love, love, then they need to admit that their interpretation may be wrong and that while they go on contemplating the doctrinal stuff, the one thing they can be certain of is that we are to treat EVERYONE with unconditional love and respect. Of course IMO that means treating gays and women as equals, but maybe I'm biased .

Now. We are all human. Many of us (regardless of religious beliefs) are more comfortable to live with an answer, whether that answer is right or wrong, adequate or inadequate, than to struggle with uncertainty and the grey areas of life. I myself have learned over time to be at ease with uncertainty, and as I have done so my understanding and practice of faith has developed and changed - in my early 20s I was uncomfortable around gay people (but always pro-women's lib). You would probably say that was down to my faith; I would say it was down to lack of exposure, negative images from society as a whole, and my upbringing - I don't recall ever hearing anything about homosexuality in church up to that point. So having gone on this journey which has brought me to be happy with uncertainty, my current position is that I need to understand better the (very few) passages in the Bible which mention homosexuality, and I want to know why gay and lesbian believers are happy to have a faith. That's one of the million questions of life that I am asking myself - so I'm in for the long haul - and until I find the answers I'm happy to say 'sod the doctrinal stuff; I'm just going to carry on treating gays with the same love and respect which I give others'.

SGB, when you see a believer who is bigoted against women, gays, etc, you see a bigot. When I see such a believer, I see someone who is (hopefully) on a journey of faith during which they will ultimately let go of the need for certainty and embrace humanity instead.

Gawd. Another essay.

Always: mocking someone's superstitions is not the same as denying them jobs or refusing them the rights to free speech/free association. No one is advocating that the believers all be fired from jobs for having opinions unless they act on those opinions in a way that adversely affects their jobs (harassing unbelievers in work time, for instance, or refusing to undertake certain tasks.)
MrsMH, the trouble is that the major myth brands are instituationally bigoted and this is what merits constant criticism or them. To say that the rules and regs of each one are a reflection of the times the set texts were written may well be true, but doesn't actually suggest that a supernatural intelligence was in charge of the transmission of the rules, rather the reverse - unless the supernatural intelligence was a bronze age fuckwitted bigot itself, of course. WRT the way individuals change and develop their opinions over time, it's worth remembering that most of the time initiatives to give more people more human rights or improve the sum of human knowledge have tended to be vigorously opposed by the myth-peddling institutions, all of which benefit from a hiercarchical status quo.
A belief in supernatural shit in a nice person is just a personal quirk, such as liking jellied eels or being a stamp collector, it doesn't make the person any more or less nice. While Rowan Willians is (in this respect at least) doing some good stuff, it's in the face of a lot of entrenched opposition.

SGB, what do you mean by 'institutionally bigoted'? Are you not referring to what's written in the holy books of each religion? Is there some other foundation of these religions which you're referring to that I'm not aware of?

"most of the time initiatives to give more people more human rights or improve the sum of human knowledge have tended to be vigorously opposed by the myth-peddling institutions, all of which benefit from a hiercarchical status quo." - this sounds very much like it's just your biased opinion - could you give actual details? And while you're at it, perhaps you'd like to refer to the involvement of religious individuals and institutions in movements such as the abolition of slavery and Jubilee 2000, to name but two. Or did you conveniently blank those out?

Institutions are established by human beings. I'm sure I don't need to go again through the argument about how human beings do crap stuff because we're human.

I am not arguing by any stretch of the imagination that believers are 'better' than non-believers or somehow more forgivable when they stuff things up. Since I know my faith far better than you do, I have a far deeper and broader understanding of just how badly Christians mess up time and time again - as individuals and within institutions, and I've talked a bit about it here. But your argument is still, and has consistently remained totally one-sided, and largely based on rhetoric. So you make it very hard to regard your opinions as anything but bigoted, and therefore very hard to give your opinions the credence that you want.

"No one is advocating that the believers all be fired from jobs for having opinions unless they act on those opinions in a way that adversely affects their jobs (harassing unbelievers in work time, for instance, or refusing to undertake certain tasks.)"

So would it be ok for an atheist to refuse to do a certain task because they have moral objections to it, but not for a religious person to refuse to do it because they have faith based moral objections to it?

I think harassment of any sort is wrong, but I guess it depends on how you're defining harassment in terms of religous beliefs. Is talking about your faith in front of people harassment? What of an athiest expressing their views, talking about their strong opinions on a subject which others don't agree with during work time?

There's a difference between refusing to do something your employer has asked of you which is immoral (covering up for criminal activity or something) and refusing to do a normal part of your job eg if you are a Methodist or a Muslim and get a job in a supermarket, it is not reasonable for you to then refuse to sell alcohol to customers.
WRT talking about your opinions at work, general conversation is one thing, repeatedly banging on at either co-workers or customers who are not interested, is poor conduct - whether that's belief in the supernatural, vegetarianism, Marxism or why capital punishment should be reinstated.

MrsTH: up until very recently, all the major religious institutions have insisted that women are not equal to men and cannot hold positions of power within the institutions, the same with people who are not heterosexual. Birth control and universal suffrage and midwifery have all been regarded with suspicion if not suppression by religious institutions, as has nearly all scientific exploration.

SGB, you have proved my point about interpretation. The people within those institutions chose an interpretation of the Bible which I and millions of believers say is blatantly wrong. Just as some moron on the other side of the pond has 'interpreted' the Bible to 'prove' that Barack Obama is the devil incarnate. To give an example of this (on the subject of women), in the allegory given in Genesis of how humans came to be, it reports God as saying that both male and female shall be in my image - in other words, (1) it's representing God as neither male nor female; (2) it says that both sexes together represent the image of God - making them both equal. Now, some people will look at that story and say 'well, men came first therefore they should always come first' and completely ignore the bit I wrote about above. Others will ask you to demonstrate women leaders in the Bible (just one as far as I can recall - Deborah, a judge (i.e. leader) of the nation of Israel. This is a facile question because, as I mentioned earlier, it's a question about culture. There are examples of Jesus treating women as equals, for example - if you are bigoted you will overlook this and select only the bits that support your prejudice. So the bigoted people who happened to be in positions of power in those religious institutions that you're writing about would have taken their bigotry into their work - hence the power of interpretation as I said earlier.

"WRT talking about your opinions at work, general conversation is one thing, repeatedly banging on at either co-workers or customers who are not interested, is poor conduct" - this is an extremely delicate issue in practice, isn't, it? Because someone who is extremely sensitive about anything religious will interpret even 'general conversation' containing religious content as 'banging on'. Just as someone who's infertile will be extremely sensitive around women with babies/ pregnant tums. Interpretation is everything.

Finally, remember that you are treading on extremely dodgy ground when you make sweeping statements about what 'all' or 'nearly all' people or institutions have done, whether with regard to religion or not. Nobody has a broad enough knowledge base to make such a statement based on fact rather than personal bias.

With all due respect MrsMerryHenry, the Catholic Church and The Anglican Church are institutional bigoted because they sill, openly, do not allow either women or homosexuals into positions of power. You can argue and argue, but that basic fact still remains.

MrsMH, while an infertile person will be sensitive around PG women, unless the PG women are repeatedly telling the infertile person and everyone else to come and rub the bump and feel the baby kicking (unreasonable, thoughtless etc) the infertile person has just got to deal with the fact that other people get PG. WRT to people objecting to other people discussing their opinions on religions and superstitions, again, there is a difference between a colleague mentioning that they went to the local mosque's Christmas party or whatever, and repeatedly asking co-workers, despite the co-workes' clearly displayed lack of interest if they want to read a leaflet/come to a meeting/wear a crystal to keep off evil entities.

"do not allow either women or homosexuals into positions of power."

That's why women can now become Bishops in the Anglican church, and there are have been female vicars for donkey's years. And there have been/are gay bishops and vicars as well.

And lets face - would you apply for a job where you felt strongly that the company ethos was wrong anyhow? Those christians who wanted to have more "senior" roles in churches and in the past have not been able to at all have moved to other denominations, or fought hard for change from within.

Interestingly the strongest critic of women priests I have ever met is a woman. Who will quote verse after verse of bible passages at you to "prove" why she's right.

I wouldn't apply for a job a shop selling hunting accessories as I'm anti-hunting...

Slug - I agree that that is bigotry (I'm pretty sure I've agreed with that already on this thread?), possibly firmly entrenched in the founding rules of the CofE or possibly added much later in its history, as until recently the prevailing culture in the UK would have accepted the assumption that women and gays would always be sidelined, so there may have been no need to put it in writing. It infuriates me. I do not understand why it's okay for women and gays to be vicars but go no further up the ladder - to me that is utter hypocrisy and a shallow concession to the more reasonable wings of the CofE. In these debates I see so much wasting of time, money and energy over pointless nonsense - as I said earlier, if our doctrine overshadows the biblical message of love and respect then we should ditch the doctrine. Why arse around like this when there are real issues of poverty and justice to be dealt with?

I'm trying to remember how I/ we got started on this track of institutions and individuals - I honestly can't recall how it began! - but the point I've been making about individual influence is that it is dead easy to demonise and vilify an organisation as an organisation. By simplifying anything you can whittle it down to a few key points and then justify whatever you like. The press is a classic example of reductivism of this sort, and my god they are so influential that half the time we don't even notice how the way we think changes because we unwittingly absorb the modern style of press reporting.

Let me give you a real-life example of this reductivism: when a member of the Taliban argues that Britain is in favour of the Iraq War, and uses this as justification for targeting innocent British civilians, what do they mean by 'in favour of the Iraq War'? Typically, as far as I understand it, they mean that we the electorate voted in the government who voted took us into war. Therefore we must be in favour of it and so their violence is justified. Now you and I know that this is utter, fabricated puerile nonsense - that a proportion of the electorate voted; that less than half of that proportion voted Labour; that perhaps a minority of that Labour-voting minority were in favour of the war, and that possibly most people in Britain hate Tony Blair and never believed there were WMDs. We know this because we are on the inside and therefore we can see the complexities which the reductivist viewpoint tries to obliterate.

So it is with institutions, whether religious or not. Institutions do not create themselves, they are built by people, individuals who - as I said earlier - bring their bigotry or open-mindedness to work with them every day. I genuinely don't understand why this bigoted nonsense still happens in the CofE (even less so in the Catholic church). But having been a member of CofE churches, I can see that the institution is not just the leaders - the church is a huge body of people and many of them are as angry about the bigotry as you and I. So don't let your focus remain solely on the people doing the crap stuff - if there weren't non-bigots in the institution there would be no debate within the CofE, would there?

SGB I think you didn't understand my post. To rephrase, what to one non-believer is 'general conversation' about religion, may be to a particuarly sensitive non-believer 'banging on'. It's all down to interpretation, and interpretation is heavily influenced by past experience.

I saw this once at work in a well-known, mainstream media organisation. There was a colleague of mine who was a white witch, who'd go round offering to do readings, etc etc for people. Everyone was very good-natured about it, some accepted and some declined, and there were never any complaints. Now. Just imagine if she were a Christian or a Muslim, going round offering to pray for everyone. Do you honestly think the reaction would have been the same? Of course not. It's about interpretation and past experience.

MrsMH: Actually, in many cases doing that would lead to objections from some Christians or Muslims (remember, there are vicars who won't allow yoga classes in the church hall because yoga is 'satanic'). Also, presumably, your Wiccan colleage was smart enough to back off immediately if anyone indicated that they didn't like it or find it appropriate, and presumably had personal charm and good manners. A lot depends on the individual, sometimes it's obvious that someone saying 'I'll pray for you/light a candle for you' means 'I wish you well and I'm thinking of you' and you can thank them and change the subject, sometimes the 'look at me, I'm so RELIGIOUS' subtext' is there, and sometimes an individual is a fucking pest about his or her beliefs, shoehorning them into every conversation and forever coming up with new demands that inconvenience other people.

Rubbish, SGB! Do you see what I mean about your bias?

(1) There were Christians in that company. There were Muslims in that company. There was not one complaint.

(2) Do you not remember the headline-hitting story of a Christian nurse offering to pray for a patient, and another patient in the room (who the nurse didn't even talk to) who happened to be an atheist and complained about it to the authorities. Don't play games, SGB, you know for a fact that oversensitive people would complain no matter how it was done.

(3) Stop relying on your imagination to confirm your viewpoint! I said nothing about my colleague's personality; you are guessing because you desperately need to confirm what you believe. Honestly, sometimes you post like a fundamentalist Christian .

It's like a friend of mine who is a Franciscan minister in the CofE - he sometimes wears a monk's habit (on the London Underground - I kid you not). He said that he's always got a positive response from strangers, and one person said it's because he had fewer hang-ups about monks than vicars, because he sees monks as being totally dedicated unlike vicars, who he thinks are hypocrites. So: past experience influences interpretation.

Did anyone hear Jeremy Hardy complaining about Richard Dawkins being a fundamentalist atheist on the News Quiz? He described him as a "Jehovah's I-didn't-see-anything".

MrsMH: so was your colleague in fact a tiresome pest who the others only tolerated because they were nice people? I have worked with one or two people who reckoned they had psychic powers and occasionally offered to give other staff 'readings' - I would only tell them to belt up about it if they didn't take a polite refusal. And it's hardly rubbish to say that some Muslims or Christians might have taken offence and complained, you have stated yourself that plenty of religious people can be arseholes.

WRT to the praying nurse, the article I just googled and read says it was the patient who reported the incident and was 'taken aback' though not offended. The hospital do seem to have been heavy handed over that particular case, however, it is not appropriate for nurses to offer to pray with or for patients unless the patients have indicated that this would be welcome. To some patients it would be annoying and upsetting.

MrsMerryHenry, we begin to find a common ground. Actually i agree with you entirely, it is infuriating that a body that uses Love and understanding as it's USP then very deliberatly excludes over half it's membership from power. It's sad to see the institution tearing itself apart over the issue of women bishops at the moment.

My issue always has beem that it's not enough to simply disagree with the policy, where is the active opposition to the instututionalised and quite open bigotry? An analogy would be the deep South in the days of slavery. It was not enough for some landowners to say "well I don't believe in keeping slaves" while still supporting, and being supported by, the system that keeps slavery legal. Lucky slaves, someone won't buy you, but that dosen't mean you won't be bought by someone else, and those that won't buy you out of morality stand by and let it happen.

The church, well to be precise the COE, has a position of power in UK society, disproportiionate to the number of people who are active members. Just look at the Bishops in the House of Lords. You don't get to be a bishop by being liberal and not toeing the party line. So you have, at the top levels of government, individuals who are there precisely because they believe in and have a vested interest in, keeping the power to themselves. It is the Bishops who opposed equal age of consent for homosexuality. Where is the oppostioion from within the ranks? Where is the massd ranks of the congregations standing up and saying "I oppose the unequal employment laws, I oppose the discrimination against women"?? I hear a bit from the Quakers, but not a lot coming out of the churhes. If you choose to belong to an institution like that then, unless you actively oppose the bigotry within the institution, then you should, at least, bear some collective responsibility.

And that's the crux of the matter for many atheists. They know that many many religious people are good and decent human beings, but they see these religions discrimination against large sections of the population and they don't see these kind decent people doing anything to stop it. In fact they see them profiting from it. And they see the leaders of these kind, decent human beings, the leaders who propogate the inequality, being asked to speak on subjects of morality. It grates.

SGB, my point was that you were relying heavily on guesswork to back up your statements, and that as usual your statements were simplifying the picture in order to back up your own biases. No, of course my colleague was not objectionable and I doubt that she 'hassled' people; however, as per your article (a different story from the one I wrote about) you can see that even where a person doesn't feel hassled (therefore we can 'guess' that the nurse in question may well have been as nice to people as my Wiccan colleague, can't we?), they still feel strongly enough to complain. How can you possibly try to deny that oversensitive people would not misinterpret religious information in a work context?

Slug, we do agree a lot! I honestly couldn't tell you about what opposition to bigotry there is within the CofE because I haven't been to a CofE church for years. In fact, I've only very recently started going to any church again after a long and informative absence - an absence from the church, mind, not from my faith. I absented myself because I had enough of rolling my eyes at all the things that annoyed me about 'Churchianity'.

I also find it a real problem that the CofE is part of the political establishment, as I mentioned earlier. IMO (and that of many believers within and outside the CofE) they should cut the ties, sell off loads of their land and start doing something radical for a change. But they're not. Well, there are pockets around the country where people are making a genuine difference to communities and issues of poverty and injustice. But as an organisation they're limping along, which is just not good enough.

MrsMH, you tell an anecdote about a bunch of people I don't know as though it expresses some universal truth, when it doesn't. That your wiccan colleague was polite rather than hectoring, and your other colleagues tolerant, are reasonable assumptions to make but it IS true that some people are overly pushy about their pet belief system and other people overly offended by the public display of, or subtle/unsubtle pressure to accommodate or at least not laugh at or contradict, belief systems they don't share.