Why is a pancake unlike a marriage?

Yesterday, in the UK and other countries, was Pancake Day, a secular celebration of the tastiness of pancakes.

It was also, of course, Shrove Tuesday, the last date in the Christian Calendar before the start of Lent. Traditionally, pancakes would be eaten to use up stocks of rich foods before the start of Lent fasting and repentance.

The secular co-option of the fun bits of the tradition in a way that almost entirely inverts the point of the tradition is not unique to this particular event, of course, but I wasn't able to find anyone anywhere complaining that the celebration of Pancake Day was taking away from the meaning and seriousness of Shrove Tuesday and Lent.

Meanwhile, the usual forces of Christianity-excused heterosexism were campaigning strongly that their particular current definition of marriage should be the only legally-supported and state-recognised one, on the grounds that allowing other definitions - even trivial amendments which entirely retain the stated¹ point of the tradition - would weaken their own.

It's an interesting contrast.

Footnote

¹ There are arguably certain points - more common historically - regarding the control of women which same-sex marriage would subvert, of course. But they will deny if asked that this is the particular point that would be weakened.

Atheism and the kyriarchy

There have been quite a few high-profile incidents of racism and sexism among some atheist communities recently. These have been followed by the predictable pattern of soul-searching about what can be done to prevent them and get more people who aren't white men involved in atheism, countered by the predictable denial that there's any problem at all by the selectively skeptical.

Now, obviously any community that exists in this society is going to be vulnerable to reproducing this society's ideas of the default person, even if its aims are apparently unrelated to structural discrimination. Privilege is designed to be invisible to its owners, so without a concerted effort to work against it (and even then...), people will inevitably repeat dominant social values even if they don't want to.

But I think these particular atheist communities have more fundamental problems than that.

Firstly, what Tami said in the post linked above:

But there is a difference between seeking to use reason and making skepticism and reason an identity. The latter, I'm beginning to think, results not in injecting more reasonableness into public discourse, but less, as people who are invested in touting their own superior logic are rarely self-aware enough to spot and acknowledge the places where their thinking has been colored by bias. And make no mistake--no one is immune to the biases inherent in our society--not even the guy who calls himself a Skeptic and fancies himself the smartest person in the room.

Secondly, their aims are, by definition incompatible with the ending of kyriarchal systems of privilege.

Their rhetoric makes it very clear that they¹ wouldn't be satisfied with a society in which religious belief and lack of religious belief were treated as equal. They want to be above religion, with religious people the subject of disdain for their "irrational" and "obsolete" beliefs.

And there is the problem. They want to be on top of the heap. They dispute the construction of the heap - why are atheists not at the top of it² - but they don't object to its existence. It's no surprise therefore that debates over "what should the relative position of men and women in the heap be?" are frequent - the alternative answer of destroying the heap entirely is unthinkable.

All forms of oppression are so strongly entangled that it cannot be possible to eliminate one³ without attempting to eliminate all of them. By supporting and encouraging the existence of the heap, they make it impossible to eliminate the other parts of the heap they disagree with.

Footnote

¹ I've had to be fairly non-specific about exactly which atheist communities I'm referring to, because it's not as if there are official denominations of atheist. So the definition is going to have to be somewhat circular: "the sort of atheist I'm talking about is the sort of atheist who fits the description I give". But I hope nevertheless it's obvious enough that there are many atheists and atheist communities that are not like this, and who I'm not talking about here.

² How far down they are of course varies considerably by country and region, as well as many other factors. Trends suggest that they will get to the top of the heap and be the default eventually, at least in some places, just through weight of numbers.

³ That's not to say that I believe, ad absurdum, that all existing forms of oppression will end simultaneously or not at all. Clearly on some day in the distant future it may be that racism ends but some heterosexism continues, or vice versa. For now, however, all forms are so entangled that trying to end one (or a few) in isolation is doomed to failure.

Given the attempts by some of these atheists to, for instance, redefine religion as mental illness, I think they're more likely to increase the entanglements between oppressions than decrease them.

Allowing religion as an excuse for discrimination: consultation response

Spark in Darkness highlights an Equality and Human Rights Commission consulation (Word document) on its intervention in a number of religious discrimination cases.

As pointed out by Sparky, the consultation wording is pretty bad, and seriously downplays the discriminatory nature of the inactions that two of the plaintiffs were rightly barred from. The consultation also makes it quite difficult to find the details of the cases - they give you a link about six steps out in the convoluted court website, and then approximately describe the first two steps needed to find them (one of which no longer works as described). As linked below, there are perfectly good¹ direct links to the case descriptions!

The cases in question are:

• The two cases Eweida and Chaplin, in which the plaintiffs were forbidden from wearing particular visible Christian symbols as part of their work uniform.
• The two cases Ladele and McFarlane, in which the plaintiffs hold that requiring them to carry out all aspects of their jobs with all clients was discriminatory, since heterosexist discrimination is part of their religion.

In all four cases, the UK courts have decided that the plaintiffs were not subject to unfair discrimination.

Currently the EHRC's position is that the UK courts were wrong in the first two cases, and correct in the last two. They also ask if a concept of "reasonable accommodation" should be applied to religious discrimination.

It is crucial, of course - to prevent religious exemptions and "conscience clauses" from making equality laws useless - that the European courts uphold the decisions against Ladele and McFarlane. It's also therefore important that the EHRC does not ask those courts to rule in favour of Ladele and McFarlane. Please send a response to their consultation if you have time (contact details on the final page of the consultation document, deadline 5 September.

Here's my response:

Regarding your consultation on intervention in four religious discrimination cases before the European courts:

Response to question 1:

In the case of Eweida, I believe that the courts probably made the correct decision based on current law, given that "In the interim, British Airways had offered to move the applicant without loss of pay to work involving no public contact, but the applicant had chosen to reject this offer and instead to stay away from work and claim her pay as compensation.".

Whether or not this decision was correct would depend in my view on whether the alternative work offered was at a similar standard - not just in pay but in working conditions, opportunities for promotion and skills development, fit with the plaintiff's skillset, and so on - to the original work. If it was - and the UK courts appear to have found that it was - I can see no reason for BA to make payments based on the plaintiff not taking up this offer.

In the case of Chaplin, I believe that the court's response was also correct. The hospital's uniform policy was designed to minimise risk of infection and preserve health, and so requiring employees to follow it should be considered a legitimate restriction "necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, [and] the protection of [...] health".

Response to question 2:

In both of these cases I believe that the domestic courts made the correct decision. Both plaintiffs were required to carry out particular tasks as part of their jobs, without discrimination based on the sexuality of their clients. This is not a case where the religious discrimination claimed is largely unrelated to the performance of their jobs, but one where their religion is definitionally incompatible in their view with the duties of their job. In this case, there should be no responsibility upon the employer to vary the duties, especially where such variance would require discrimination against other protected groups. Protection against religious discrimination should not extend to being able to pick and choose which aspects of ones job should be carried out.

Response to question 3:

A "reasonable accommodation" test for religious discrimination would seem - on the basis of the four cases presented - to be superfluous with current law.

In Eweida, the employer attempted to make reasonable accommodations - firstly by offering a job in which the contested restriction would not apply, and secondly by amending the contested restriction. This was found under current law to be sufficient, and so an explicit "reasonable accommodations" law would have been unlikely to make a difference to the outcome.

In Chaplin, Ladele, and McFarlane, the cases fall outside the scope of "reasonable accommodation". The actions requested by the plaintiffs were incompatible with the duties of the job, and so no "reasonable accommodation" could have been made. Furthermore, in the cases of Ladele and McFarlane, no accommodation of the plaintiff's stance could have been provided without harming the employers' provision of service towards LGB people. Again, a "reasonable accommodations" law would have been unlikely to have made a difference. (Had, in Chaplin, a way of displaying the crucifix been available that was compatible with infection control and health and safety requirements, it seems unlikely that neither the employee nor the employer would not have suggested this at some point in the dispute)

The "reasonable adjustments" part of disability law is in my view to reflect that the infrastructure of society is generally set up by default in a way that is not accessible to people with disabilities, and so it may not be possible - especially for a small business or organisation with a very limited budget - to provide a fully accessible environment. There is therefore only a requirement to do what is financially and physically possible unilaterally, rather than requiring a multilateral rebuild of social and physical infrastructure to truly eliminate environmental disability discrimination.

There is not an analogous situation with religion - no buildings need be completely rebuilt, no tools need to be completely redesigned, and so on - and therefore the concept of "reasonable adjustments" seems unnecessary.

Footnote

¹ Well, in so far as the court website itself isn't particularly accessible or user-friendly.

Semi-Equality Act: EU directives, and views from the Minister

So, the message from the Equalities Office referred to four European Directives, claiming that they meant that the harassment protections were necessary to implement EU law - with the nasty implication, of course, that if it weren't for those directives, it would be legal to harass people in a racist, sexist or disablist fashion, provided that it didn't constitute direct or indirect discrimination.

• 2000/43/EC: article 2, paragraph 3 defines harassment as a type of discrimination, and article 3 sets out various areas in which it applies.
• 2000/78/EC: article 2, paragraph 3 again defines harassment, with articles 1 and 3 setting out that this applies to age, sexuality, disability and religion or belief, in contexts relating to employment only.
• 2002/73/EC: this is similar to 2000/78/EC but for gender discrimination and harassment in employment. It states that sexual harassment is to be considered harassment and that marital and family status cannot be used as 'covers' for discrimination.
• 2006/54/EC (PDF): extends 2002/73/EC slightly.

The Equalities Office's claim is that because of these EU regulations, the prohibitions on harassment are not redundant as they implement EU regulations.

However, the Equalities Act rightly goes beyond the requirements of the EU regulations - it forbids harassment on the grounds of gender, age and disability in many contexts other than employment.

There seems little point in raising this with the Equalities Office itself, however. It's fairly clear that their job is to defend the existing law as if it were perfect, until such time as it is changed by Parliament into another perfect form. To an extent that's even a reasonable requirement to place upon the civil service, but it does mean that getting answers to "why" questions out of them is near-impossible.

Meanwhile, the Equalities Minister, Lynne Featherstone MP (Lib Dem, Hornsey & Wood Green) was celebrating the Equality Act becoming active on 1 October. There were several comments criticising the reversals in equality for trans people that the Act caused, which she promised to look into, while expressing doubt (like her office: in opposition to what the Act's own text and Explanatory Notes says) that the Act actually would have that effect. Hopefully there she'll get some good legal advice and be in a position to repeal¹ some of those exemptions, which are designed to allow the provision of a service for transphobic individuals at the expense of trans people.

On the harassment exemptions her comment was:

Yes – Evan [Harris, then-MP for Oxford West & Abingdon] and I fought very hard over the differential discrimination in terms of LGB at school – and Labour took no notice. EU is looking at this too at the moment. Will say more when I know more.

So it looks like the EU route may be the best way to get these provisions repealed¹, though not a particularly quick one.

¹ Her Conservative coalition partners are planning a "Great Repeal Bill", though repealing clauses of legislation for the purpose of strengthening it - especially equality legislation - is probably not what they have in mind. Still, once that bill gets to first reading I'll suggest it.

In praise of unreasonableness

So, the Pope recently visited the UK, though thankfully not Durham, and there were numerous protests. As head of the Catholic church he's said a large number of extremely unpleasant things, and endorsed many anti-women and anti-LGBT views. Then there's the church hierarchy's treatment of numerous abuse cases across the decades. The protesting was hardly surprising.

One of the consequences of this, as well as the general justified sentiments against the Catholic church hierarchy and the Pope personally based on their roles in covering up abuse, recommending discrimination, and so on, has been various criticism of Catholicism and religion in general, and then from that general attacks on the idea of people believing in anything "supernatural" (including deities). There's a very short slippery slope from criticising the genuine problems with the Catholic hierarchy to anti-religious discrimination (protests are not a good place for fine distinctions like that, either, unless you're very careful).

The atheist criticism of religious belief is - in their¹ own words - that it is "not reasonable", "not rational" or "not based on the evidence". The three phrasings are given much the same meaning in practice, and the disablist connotations of irrational (and the general insult of unreasonable) are generally desired.

I entirely agree that there is not sufficiently strong scientific evidence for the existence of anything that could reasonably be described as a deity, but that's really besides the point, and the use of "not reasonable" or especially "not rational" as shorthands for "not based upon scientific evidence" is extremely problematic.

I'm going to use "unreasonable" (note the quote marks) as a shorthand for "not based on scientific views of evidence and logical conclusions from that evidence" to save space, because even though that's not quite the normal meaning of the word, it's the meaning given to it in these debates. It's true that given that definition, belief in any deity or non-deific supernatural² occurrence is "unreasonable". The problem is that so are rather a lot of other things that are commonly held beliefs and take place entirely within the natural realm.

Ethics and morals

Ethics and morals are unavoidably "unreasonable" (this is why straw-atheists don't have them). It is not possible to prove solely by the application of evidence and logic that a particular moral stance is superior to another stance.

Once you make some assumptions about what the purpose of having morals in the first place is - to keep society intact, or to maximise some measure of happiness, or to prevent certain behaviours, or whatever - you can then "reasonably" use evidence and logic to make a decision about the best ethical and moral decisions to achieve that purpose. But since your purpose was selected arbitrarily, and in practice based on socialisation and other factors external to your "reasonableness", it is itself "unreasonable".

Anything else that involves a values judgement - aesthetics, what to have for breakfast, etc. - ends up with the same situation.

The scientific method

The scientific method - in extremely concise outline - is that you make a theory to explain an aspect of nature, carry out experiments to test the theory, and refine or abandon the theory according to the results of the experiments. The idea is that over time the incorrect theories will be contradicted by experiment, and the correct ones won't, and the accuracy of the set of all current theories will therefore on average increase over time.

There's lots of added detail in practice to make sure that you don't throw out correct theories, or hang on to incorrect ones, in an attempt to get to the real right answer faster, but that's not really relevant here.

The scientific method is something I personally have a very strong belief in (the basic principle, anyway - I have quite a lot of criticism of some of the details of implementation, especially in some fields of study). It is, however, an "unreasonable" belief - I cannot prove, from the evidence, that the scientific method works.

I do have a straightforward circular argument in favour of the scientific method (summarised: "it seems to have worked so far"), but it's generally not considered "reasonable" - or indeed reasonable - to use circular arguments.

Free will

This might fall within the scope of "supernatural" for some people, but it need not. I believe that I have free will, and that so does everyone else. I don't even think it's philosophically interesting to discuss alternative situations where free will does not exist because I don't believe there's a self to exist without the existence of free will - there's just particles moving along their probabilistic paths.

I have no evidence of a scientific sort for this, and only a circular argument similar to Descartés "I think therefore I am" for non-scientific evidence. It's not a "reasonable" belief, but I think it's an entirely reasonable belief given the alternatives.

So, in praise of unreasonableness

The "sceptical atheist" community is right that religious beliefs and faiths are not "reasonable". Where they're wrong is the giant leap many of them take from that to "and therefore a sign of lack of intelligence / moral inferiority / mental illness / closed-mindedness / other insult of choice." and in the implication that one can get by entirely on "reasonable" beliefs.

This results in the usual problems that happen when one group of people believes another group to be inferior to it. These are all of course criticisms that can be applied to religions too, but atheists claim to be above the "irrational" actions of religion.

Firstly, while in the UK atheists don't have the structural power to discriminate against the default religion of Christianity (whatever the Pope might say), they are by a significant margin the second-most powerful belief group and so can quite happily contribute to the oppression of believers in religions lower down the local kyriarchy. See also France and the way an aggressive anti-religious message (masquerading as secularism) has been mixed with racism for a wholly counter-productive ban on Islamic veils.

Stereotyping the extremely diverse beliefs of a billion co-religionists to their most extreme members lends itself to being a cover for other forms of bigotry (most directly racism and disablism, and a claim that one is being "unreasonable" or "irrational" is an extremely common silencing tactic everywhere).

I don't want a situation where atheists end up at the top of the pile instead. This isn't going to happen any time this century even in a secularish country like the UK, but it shouldn't even be a goal - the goal should be to end religious privilege and discrimination, but that's a goal that many atheists would reject as treating "unreasonable" beliefs as valid.

Secondly, it makes it more difficult to get co-operation between atheists and religious people on mostly unrelated social justice matters. This also makes it harder to work together on matters related to the conduct of religious organisations where, to return to the start of this post for an example, the majority of both atheists and UK Catholics have serious disagreement's with the Catholic hierarchy's decisions on abortion, contraception, LGBT rights, women's rights, and so on.

You end up with the usual problem of intersecting oppressions, though perhaps with the default in the other place, where the existence and experience of Catholic LGBT people gets erased by both their own religious hierarchy and by their supposed allies, or action within religious communities in favour of women's equality is dismissed as irrelevant because it takes place within a religious setting.

There seems to be an attitude that because religious people have an "unreasonable" belief in one area, there's no point in trying to work with them in other areas despite this disagreement, but instead one must convince them of the truth of atheism first. This never ends well. It can also lead to an approach where people try to find scientific justifications for ethical decisions, and I've looked at one example of the problems with that approach before. Science is a valuable tool for humanity, but it's not supposed to be used for everything.

Thirdly, as I've said above, it misses the point. I don't believe in social justice because I have scientific standards of evidence that the world would be a better place without the kyriarchy - I don't even know what a non-kyriarchal world would look like in practice - but because I have what would be insultingly dismissed as "faith" that it would be better (according to my own ethical values) than what we currently have. I'm happy to hold that "unreasonable" belief and work towards it. Having decided "unreasonably" that this is a goal, my approach is going to be at times very much based on scientific evidence, of course, but that doesn't make the goal itself scientifically "reasonable".

Let's be "unreasonable", because there is too much that is important that cannot be dealt with "reasonably". Let's let other people have their own "unreasonable" beliefs, if they don't cause harm; and let's focus on the harm caused, not whether that harm has a scientific or an "unreasonable" backing³, if they do.

Footnotes

¹ While my personal beliefs in deities and other supernatural things are very similar to those of a sceptical atheist, and while I agree that there is no scientific evidence for deities and the supernatural, I don't at all agree with the conclusions generally drawn from this, so I'm not using "our" here.

² The definition of "supernatural" versus "natural" is hardly the dichotomy that it's made out to be - see Clarke's Third Law. Determining whether a "supernatural" event is really "outside nature" or just a sign that some previously reliable theories need refining would in practice keep people busy for centuries or longer. Meanwhile, by definition, anything genuinely supernatural would not be amenable to scientific study.

³ People asserting a scientific backing for their claims, when their claims do not meet general scientific standards, should be criticised for this, of course, and claims that are purported to be scientific can of course be meaningfully analysed by scientific methods.

Season's Greetings

The first daffodil of spring is finally flowering in our garden...

...though it looks like there might be another long wait before the second.

In the UK, "Season's Greetings" is often used as an apparently non-religious statement around Christmas time. It perhaps provides an alternative for those culturally-Christian atheists and agnostics who don't actually want their card to explicitly mention Christmas, but of course the default of "Christian" (cultural rather than theological) ends up reinforced because you can only get "Season's Greetings" cards for winter. And only the start of it, around the Christian and secular celebrations of Christmas and the nearby secular celebrations of Gregorian New Year.

So, Season's Greetings, those of you who are also experiencing a temperate climate's northern hemisphere Spring.

Sceptical Intersections

This guest post at Liberal Conspiracy, is in many ways an excellent example of the "Sexism in the atheist community" described by Amy Clare.

It describes the "Skeptical Voter" project, which is asking MPs the following questions:

1. Do you support the use of public funds to provide unproven alternative "treatments" such as homeopathy?
2. Should schools be allowed to teach creationism as an equivalent theory to evolution?
3. Do you believe that religious belief should be legally protected from ridicule?
4. Should an independent government adviser whose views in their area of expertise conflict with government policy be able to express those views publicly without fear of being sacked?
5. Should Sharia law be allowed as an alternative system within UK law?
6. Do you agree that testing on animals (within strict criteria) is a necessary part of the development of medicines?
7. Should policy-makers trust scientific evidence even when it appears counter-intuitive?
8. Do you think that abortion time limits should always be determined by the current scientific and medical consensus?
9. Should religious leaders be entitled to vote in the House of Lords?
10. Do you support the reform of English and Welsh libel law to allow a stronger 'public interest' defence?

Presumably the answers an MP totally in line with their views would give are "Yes" to 4, 6, 7, 8 and 10, and "No" to the others.

Here we have the example, because some of these questions could quite easily be given an answer other than the expected one by someone who was nevertheless in favour of science-based policy and a secular society. There seems both to be an anti-religious attitude (rather than a secular one) and (at best) a lack of understanding of privilege.

Question 3 is not completely clear, because of the way this question is sometimes tied to similar questions about sexuality, and might end up tied to similar questions about other axes of oppression should the Public Order Act be extended further. An MP might reasonably conclude that such a provision was a compromise worth making in exchange for similar provisions on gender, appearance, sexuality, disability, and so on. If removing the "avoidance of doubt" clause in 29J was the price to remove the far more problematic one in 29JA, it might well be worth paying.

Question 5 is extremely worrying. The group seems (from comments at the LC post) to be in favour of banning faith-based arbitration. I really don't see what it has to do with them if two people mutually agree to arbitration under particular terms, even if those terms are religious. Furthermore, while the group seems to be in favour of banning faith-based arbitration generally, the question and most of their efforts are towards Sharia-based tribunals rather than the longer standing (but less subject to recent tabloid panic) Beth Din.

Even without the discriminatory notes of singling out a particular religion's method of arbitration, the whole question seems more anti-religion than secular. With the focus on Sharia specifically, it seems to tie in to the general Islamaphobic racism present in the UK today.

Question 8 is another extremely worrying one. The recent debate on the time limits for abortion provision (England, Wales and Scotland only, with two doctors approving) was mostly framed around how likely it was that premature babies born after X weeks gestation would survive, with '24 weeks' being "reasonable chance" with current technology, and '20 weeks' being "extremely unlikely indeed" with current technology (but claimed to be "also a reasonable chance" by many of those pushing for a lower limit).

While it's true that those in favour of reducing the limit were misrepresenting the science, I don't think an answer of "Yes" to this question is a particularly pro-choice stance either, because it accepts a very dangerous - and inevitably losing - frame for the argument. At some point medical science will probably advance to the stage where the "uterine replicators" of science fiction are possible. Their existence will not be a good reason to ban abortion. Closer to the present, when medical science does advance to the point where a baby born after only 20 weeks gestation does have a reasonable chance of survival, this won't be a reason that abortion of an unwanted fetus shouldn't be allowed to 24 weeks (though, it will probably be used as one).

Viability of premature babies provides another (slightly fuzzy) dividing line to go along with conception and birth, and being currently somewhere in the middle, it's an obvious one to use for many people (including myself, before I actually thought about it a bit more). That doesn't mean it's the right line to use.

Question 9 is not as clear as they seem to think, either. Yes, the appearance in the House of Lords of the Anglican bishops is a historical anomaly and not a desirable one (but then, the appearance of people in the House of Lords whose sole qualification for membership is that their great grandfather was there too is also an undesirable anomaly).

However, several proposals for reforming the House of Lords involve making a chamber of representatives from various sectors of society. It wouldn't be unreasonable in that case to have a few representatives from the major UK religions (and of course in that case there should be some form of representation for atheists and agnostics too). Religion is a major part of many people's lives, and some representation for it in government seems fair (especially for those of religions other than Christianity, who in the UK at least are subject to more discrimination than atheists)

Any other problems I've missed?