Not about gun licensing

The following is the near-verbatim contents of a letter I recently received. It has been redacted for the privacy of the individuals involved, and cunningly revised. Can you tell what the letter was actually about? (Note: this is an issue that affects British people, and those in some other countries. It will be unfamiliar to Canadians and Americans.) Can you tell what bothers me about it?

WARNING: THIS PROPERTY IS UNLICENSED

To the Legal Occupier,

We're writing to inform you that we have authorised Enforcement Officers to visit your home. If they find evidence that you own a firearm illegally, they can take your statement under caution in accordance with the relevant criminal law.

We are taking this step because:

• According to our records, there is no Firearm Licence for this address
• You must have a Firearm Licence to own a firearm
• We have tried to contact you about this, but have received no reply
  

An enforcement visit is the first step in our action to seek prosecution. Please be aware that should your case go to court, your statement can be used as evidence. The maximum penalty is a fine of £XXXX. We take this offence extremely seriously, and catch around 1,000 evaders every day.

We strongly advise that you act to stop our investigation by buying a Firearm Licence. You can do this in minutes by visiting www.firearmlicensing.co.uk or by calling 08XX XXX XXXX. A licence costs £XXX.XX for a rifle and £XXX.XX for a pistol.

Yours faithfully,

XXXXXX XXXXXX
Regional Manager
Scotland East Enforcement Team

If you have recently moved home, please transfer your old Firearm Licence to your new address. You can do this at www.firearmlicensing.co.uk/moving or by calling 08XX XXX XXXX. Please have your Firearm Licence number to hand.

If you don't have a firearm, please let us know by calling 08XX XXX XXXX.

How to Pay:

• Visit www.firearmlicensing.co.uk to pay by Direct Debit, debit card or credit card.
• Call 08XX XXX XXXX to pay by Direct Debit, debit card or credit card
• Go to any PayPoint outlet to pay by cash or debit card.
• More ways to pay are listed overleaf.

Overleaf, it is finally mentioned that if you, in fact, don't have a firearm, you can let them know. They will then verify the situation. People who are deemed unable to use a firearm because of infirmity can get a reduced rate or a free licence, depending on circumstances. Payment details and a change of address form take up most of the back side.

Competing religious liberties

This is further to a post from a few weeks back about a petition to expand religious freedom regarding civil partnerships.

Civil partnerships are the closest thing same-sex couples in the UK have to marriage. Religious organizations are not allowed to perform civil partnerships in the UK. Several religious communities, including the Unitarians that I heard it through, would like to perform these ceremonies, and feel that it is an arbitrary restriction on their freedom of conscience not to allow them to do so. I completely agree, and support them in their effort to reform the law.

Some weeks later, I was chatting with a conservative Christian friend of mine, and this topic came up. I thought this was a straightforward issue - nobody could reasonably oppose the petition, even if they didn't want to support it.

My friend put an interesting argument for the other side, though. She said that, if religious groups are allowed to perform these ceremonies, equality legislation regarding the provision of services to people regardless of sexual orientation might lead to churches being forced to perform civil partnership ceremonies. Otherwise, they'd be up for human-rights violations for unfairly discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation. This, she said, would unfairly impose on their freedom of conscience.

I actually agree - such an eventuality would be unjust in much the same way that the current situation is unjust: it would prevent people from exercising their freedom of conscience.

Now, the obvious (not just to me) solution to the whole mess is to separate state marriage from church marriage entirely. If you want government recognition of your marriage, you would register it at a government office. No church ceremony would have any legal weight, and therefore churches could be put under no obligation to perform services that their consciences object to. Her church would be safe from discrimination. The Unitarians and other liberal churches would be free to treat same-sex unions the same as opposite-sex unions. Everybody would be happy.

But of course, the complete disentangling of church and state, especially in Britain, especially for marriage, would be a difficult task. (A worthy task, I think, but a difficult one.)

So we seem to be left with the choice about whose freedom of conscience to protect - the liberals' or the conservatives'? (Put more personally, is it my freedom of conscience, or my friend's, that gets violated?)

But that's not really the choice before us. It's a choice between a real and present restriction on the liberal churches' freedom on the one hand, and a hypothetical and avoidable restriction on the conservative churches' freedom on the other. The liberal churches are currently currently unable to treat same-sex couples as equal to opposite-sex couples, and this deeply offends their moral sensibilities. The conservative churches are not forced to do anything. The only way they would be is if legislators made the law more equal without including protection for freedom of conscience. I seriously doubt that they would overlook such a detail, given the undeniably strong political force wielded by the religious lobby. Not only that, but many others (such as me) would object to conservative churches being forced to marry couples they don't want to - be they of the same-sex, of different religions, of different races - whatever.

So again, I'm back to my original position. The ideal solution would be to keep church ceremonies completely separate from state-recognized marriage. This isn't a radical idea - even Mexico, with a largely religious population, does it. In Britain, the solution more likely to be worked out in the short term is to remove the prohibition on churches performing same-sex marriages, while maintaining the important freedom of conscience that would allow conservative churches to continue discriminating in this area.

My European representatives

Last week, I voted for the first time in the European election. (For those not familiar with the EU electoral system, voting is granted on residency rather than nationality, so although I have only a Canadian passport, I am still able to vote.)

The results are out. I have yet to make heads or tails of the overall results. Since each of the 27 member countries fields its own parties, the resulting body is inevitably a jambalaya of different interests.

But at the national level, one can get a fair idea of what any given country has fielded. The UK results are troubling in two ways.

First - a topic I've complained about before - only about a third of the eligible electorate turned out. In a country with almost 50 million eligible voters, only 15 million of us bothered to participate. There are sometimes good reasons not to vote - medical emergencies, natural disasters, and the like - but a good many of those who don't vote had bad reasons. Couldn't be bothered to vote. Didn't think it would make a difference. Hadn't read up on the issues. Not interested in politics.

Though it may lose me the title of "friendly" humanist, I have to say that all of those are pathetic excuses. Democracy is not something that other people give us, as some kind of birthright. It's something we must continually exercise. It is all too easy to lose. Look at the Belgians and the Luxembourghers - they had a 91% turnout!

Second, I am frankly embarrassed at the representation that my fellow British voters chose.

A quarter of a million Britons supported the joint ticket Christian Party and Christian People's Alliance. I have nothing against people believing what they like, and living their own lives in accordance with their beliefs, but these parties' platforms are fully oriented toward establishing a theocracy. I guess the lessons of Britain's history of state-sponsored religion are lost on some people. (Catholic-Protestant violence both ways, the persecution of the Covenanters, and probably others I haven't yet learned of.)

Fortunately, the Christian parties fell short of enough votes to send a single candidate to the European Parliament.

More appalling is the fact that the British National Party 2 seats. This is an openly racist, xenophobic party. (Membership is open only to whites, for example.) And almost a million British voters thought they would make the best representatives in Europe. Scary.

I'm also disturbed that UK Independence Party got 13 seats. While they are not as scary as the BNP (they even make a point of saying they're not racist), their policies tend toward the unrealistically insular "Britain for British", "cut all immigration" sentiment, which sets off warning bells for me. And they got the 2nd most votes of all UK parties in this election, with 2.5 million.

I don't fully understand the EU, and I have strong reservations about some of its influence, but xenophobia is not a helpful reaction. (I need to acknowledge, though, that my opinions are those of a Canadian working in Britain. In addition, academia seems to have more international representation than almost any other employment sector.)

Having said all that, I do want to point out that, if my neighbours really want to vote for these people, then these people should be their representatives.

That's democracy for you.

Even when I hate how someone exercises their power, denying them that power is not an appropriate response. (You know the Belgians and Luxembourghians I praised earlier? Each country sent 3 representatives from its dominant Christian political party. I'm far more encouraged at the turnout than discouraged at the religious sentiment.)

Until they cross the line and start undermining the freedoms that democracy relies on - like freedom of expression and of conscience, and basic human rights. Which I suspect fringe groups like the BNP and the pro-theocracy crowd might do, given the chance.

Honestly: for the most part, this is a great country. But sometimes its people make my head spin.

Image credits:

EU flag image from Wikimedia Commons, multiple authors (see linked page). Public domain.

Jambalaya image from Wikimedia Commons, copyright Cliff Hutson. Licenced under the GNU Free Documentation License and the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

On dialogue, genocide, and plague

I would like to apologize for the long gap in posts. I am currently near the end of writing up my PhD dissertation, and almost all of my time and energy is going into that. Below is a post I composed almost a month ago, but didn't get around to tidying up until today. When the PhD is finished, I hope to get back to semi-regular, semi-frequent posting. See you then.

Early last month, the University of Calgary tried (not for the first time) to prevent a student group from holding a display about abortion. Fortunately, they failed - the group held their display, unmolested by campus security. The attempt to thwart them got the group more attention and more sympathy than they would otherwise have received.

Why all the fuss? Why not just let them do their thing? Well, it wasn't simply an anti-abortion display. The group, Campus Pro-Life, was presenting the Genocide Awareness Project, a sensationalist affair, based on the claim that abortion rates in the developed world (25% in Canada) amount to a genocide. Vivid photographs of both aborted fetuses and genocide victims feature prominently. Despite its unsavory tone, and despite the way this analogy ignores the many glaring and important differences between abortion and the intentional extermination of an entire culture (reductio ad hitlerum, anyone?), it is clear to me that trying to ban them from campus is contrary to the spirit of open discussion of ideas that universities are founded on.

I felt drawn to this incident as one where I could support a group's right to put out there message, while disagreeing with the content of that message on almost every level. (I've done so before.) So I contacted them and spent a pleasant hour over lunch chatting with member Matthew Wilson, a very thoughtful and friendly guy. I am grateful to him for helping me refine (and, in some spots, correct) the following contemplations.

At the root of the abortion debate seems to be a fundamental disagreement over the basis of human rights.

To me, human rights derive from those properties of human existence that we most value: consciousness, sentience, free will. It is because we share these properties to some extent with other animals that I recently became and remain a vegetarian. It is because the early stages of a human embryo do not share these properties that I do not see abortion as a kind of murder.

To anti-abortionists, the start of the new human organism at conception is the point where human rights are imbued, by definition. Although many people hold this position for religious reasons, it is neither the case that all religious people are anti-abortion nor that all anti-abortionists rely on religious arguments. (Whatever his feelings, Matthew did not give me one religious argument in the hour we dug through this issue.)

After an hour's careful and enthusiastic discussion with Matthew, I have to conclude that these two positions are simply irreconcilable - each is based on axioms that are fairly impervious to persuasion.

But just because I disagree doesn't mean I can't try to put myself in their shoes, see what it's like. If I accept their axioms rather than mine, then abortion would indeed amount to murder. Let's even accept, for argument's sake, that this justifies calling an abortion rate of 25% "genocide".

What else follows from the belief that every fertilized human egg is ethically equivalent to a human baby? Well, just as not all deaths outside the womb are due to murder - the vast majority are natural, accidental, or from disease - so not all prenatal deaths are due to abortion. In fact, the vast majority of these are also from "natural" causes - called either miscarriage and stillbirth, depending on whether the fetus dies before or after 20 weeks gestation.

The stillbirth rate is very low (around 0.6% in Canada), but miscarriage is another matter. About 10-20% of pregnancies that the mother knows about miscarry. In studies that use detailed detection techniques, about 30% of clinically-recognized pregnancies end in miscarriage. (In this case, "clinically-recognized" means "exhibiting the hormone produced on uterine implantation of the embryo".) Extrapolating to those fertilized eggs that never get implanted and so are currently impossible to medically detect, 75% of conceptions may fail to carry to term.

So three quarters of conceived (and thus fully-human, by the anti-abortionists' lights) embryos miscarry - die without anyone setting out to kill them. And of those that survive this natural winnowing, 25% are then aborted intentionally (about 6% of total conceptions).

The vast majority of pre-birth deaths are miscarriages - twelve times as many as are aborted. If abortion is genocide, miscarriage is a plague unparalleled in human history, claiming 75% of all human lives.

So if Matthew and his colleagues are indeed pro-life, and not simply anti-abortion, what obligation does this knowledge place on them? Isn't miscarriage a more immediate and profound problem than the relatively minuscule one of abortion?

Thanks to Matthew, I have firsthand examples of the responses that anti-abortionists might make to this challenge.

Acknowledgment. To his credit, Matthew acknowledged that the miscarriage statistics, which were new to him, did represent a grave human tragedy from his perspective. (To my discredit, I had originally expected any anti-abortionist to try to wiggle out of such an acknowledgment. Thankyou, Matthew, for proving me wrong.)

Ignorance. I can't deny that the statistics on miscarriage are colossally under-reported. Perhaps people fail to protest this epidemic of miscarriage simply because they're not aware of it. But ignorance is always a shaky excuse. It is particularly so in this case, where a significant minority of women in the anti-abortion movement are bound to have had miscarriages themselves, and so come face-to-face with this reality. I understand that one way in which doctors seek to console parents who suffer a miscarriage is to let them know how common it is - there is nothing wrong with them in particular. Do those who become aware of the problem have no obligation to share it with others whose worldview would motivate them to help fix it?

Intentionality. The strongest reason why anti-abortionists might not choose to act on the miscarriage crisis, despite its scope and import, is the fundamental ethical difference between abortion and miscarriage. One is a conscious act on the part of humans; the other is not. Abortion would be ended if doctors and women simply chose en masse not to do it; miscarriage will not be solved so easily (if a solution is even possible). And given the limited resources of the anti-abortion movement, it is clear where they should focus their efforts first.

(It is interesting to consider, however, that no conception occurs entirely without the participation of human choice. If you know that the consequences of unprotected sex are 3 times as likely to lead to a death as to a life, what responsibility do you bear for the deaths of any embryos your actions generate?)

On balance, I don't feel that these responses are quite adequate to justify the deafening silence from anti-abortionists (particularly those who use terms like "genocide") on the problem of miscarriage. It is simply too big a problem, when I try to look from their perspective, to simply ignore. Action may be expensive, but words are not. It would cost little to mention this problem, and it may serve to spur more people to act for the millions of unborn humans who (from the perspective of the anti-abortionists) die unnecessarily every year.

It is for this reason that I avoid calling their movement "pro-life". Such a positive label would require at least consistency of approach. Until that is exhibited, I can only recognise that they are anti-abortion.


But, like I mentioned above, our positions seem to boil down to a simply irreconcilable conflict of basic assumptions. So I hope Matthew and other anti-abortionists will correct any mistakes in my assumptions and reasoning. But this gulf makes me pose an even deeper and (for me) more troubling question - one that Matthew and I tried but failed to answer in a satisfactory manner. When people in a liberal democracy disagree so much that any state of affairs will be intolerably unethical to someone, how can we come to a decision about a direction to take as a society?

Alberta Votes (2 of 3): Apathy

This is the second of 3 reflections on the 2008 Alberta election. In the first of them, I railed against the fact that 53% of the votes were translated into 87% of the seats - an overwhelming legislative majority from a bare minimum popular majority.

What I didn't dwell on is the fact that those 72 seats were actually won with the support of just over 20% of eligible voters. Overall, only 41% of people who could vote did vote. Apathy in this wealthy province is rampant.

Part of me feels the same way about this as I do about people who found last year's Scottish ballots too confusing - that people who can't be bothered to put a little time into exercising their democratic rights deserve to be uncounted. Democracy depends on an informed, responsible electorate, which in my mind excludes people too lazy to vote, or too lazy to take the time to understand a ballot a six-year-old could follow.

But there's more to it than people getting what's coming to them. If a government can come to overwhelming power with the support of only 20% of the people, is it still a democracy? What if it's just 10%? 5%?
Those of us who take our democratic responsibilities seriously can't just sit back and sneer because so many of our neighbours are disenfranchising themselves. We all benefit from a thriving democratic process in which everyone participates and feels involved.

There have already been proposals regarding Albertans' apathy.

The main contender seems to be suggestions for compulsory voting. Several countries have some form of sanction to encourage voting, from the mild fines in Australia and Belgium to heavy financial consequences in Bolivia and even difficulty getting a driver's licence or passport in Greece. The evidence suggests that compulsion does, indeed, increase participation. But the question is whether this forced participation is good for democracy. As I said above, democracy is based on informed, responsible participation. As anti-compulsion campaigners in Australia point out, you can force someone to vote but you can't force them to vote responsibly. At worst, compulsion would mean that the 60% of people who currently don't vote in Alberta would just vote randomly, obscuring any rational, considered decisions from the 40% of responsible voters. It could make a mockery of the idea of democracy.

What we need is some means of persuading people that their vote counts, that it is worth their while to voluntarily educate themselves on the choices and vote out of a will to participate.

What we need, in fact, is electoral reforms. See my previous post for more details on electoral reform. Check out the table of countries in the Wikipedia article on voter turnout. Notice that Canada is toward the bottom, with 76% turnout in recent elections. Alberta's 41% would be well off the bottom of this graph. If you go through this list of 36 countries and look up what their electoral system is, you'll find that the first-past-the-post system we use here in Canada is far more prevalent toward the bottom, among the countries with lower voter turnout. I admit, this is by no means a clear and rigorous statistical observation, but it is suggestive.

Compulsion as exercised in other countries is often not severe - the fines in Australia are under $100, no worse than a speeding ticket - but it attacks the wrong problem. The problem is not simply that not enough people vote; it's that not enough people feel involved, not enough people are inspired by the idea of participating in a democracy. Part of that is due to an electoral system that doesn't represent voters' preferences well. Part of it is because most voters today haven't been face-to-face with the alternatives to democracy. Part of it is because we often have rather insipid, uninspiring politicians.

I'd rather not have to go to war or beat down an upstart dictator in our own country just to inspire participation in our democracy, so let's see about changing things on a less revolutionary level, eh? Simple, empowering electoral reforms have a real chance of turning around the rampant apathy we have in Canada, Britain, and other developed countries.

Alberta Votes (1 of 3): Representation

This past Monday, there was a provincial election here in my home province of Alberta, Canada, in which the reigning Progressive Conservatives (the "Tories") advanced their majority, ending up with 72 of the 83 seats in the provincial legislature.

I am troubled by the fact that this 87% legislative majority was won with 53% of the popular vote*. (Another horror is the fact that only 41% of eligible voters bothered to cast ballots, but I'll leave that for an upcoming post.)

If we break down the popular vote by party, and translate it to proportions of seats (as, for example, happens in Proportional Representation), we would see a very different legislature. The PC party got 53% of the vote. If they got 53% of the seats (still a legitimate majority), they'd have 44. That's 28 fewer seats than they actually got. If we follow this through, the Liberals would be up thirteen seats, at 22; the NDP would be up five seats at 7; and two parties that didn't get any members elected would get in: the Wildrose Alliance won 6 seats worth of the popular vote, and the Greens won 4 seats worth. (Nobody else won a seat's worth of the vote.)

So, is the new legislature representative? Only in that the parties with more votes got more seats - the proportions are wildly out. Part of that is due to the fact that the PC stronghold - the rural ridings - have smaller populations. At the extreme, the largest riding is Calgary North West with 60,511 voters and the smallest is Dunvegan-Central Peace with 23,649, just over a third as many voters, according to this academic source.

But a big part of the problem is the plurality (or first-past-the-post) voting system. It is the most simplistic, least representative sort of ballot used in modern democracies. For example, many of the seats won by the PCs in the recent election were won with less than half of the popular vote. That means representatives sitting in legislature, representing a riding where more than half the voters voted against them. Disadvantages of our plurality voting system include split votes and the necessity of tactical voting.

There are so many alternative voting systems that I won't even mention them all - just a couple I have recent experience with.

The recent Scottish Parliament elections used a mixed plurality and proportional-representation system to combine individual representation with party-proportional balance. Most people found it fairly straightforward, and I for one felt much more empowered than I have in simple first-past-the-post elections.

The local council elections held at the same time used the Single Transferable Vote (STV) system, which is even easier to understand and implement. In it, a voter marks the candidates in order of preference. You can follow the above links to find out more, but the consequence is that, on one paper, you can express not only who you would most like to get in, but also who you would least like to get in. As an example, there are several seats (at least 9 by my count) in this election that had more people voting for "left-ish" parties (Liberal, NDP, Green) than for "right-ish" parties (PC, Wildrose Alliance), where the PC candidate got in because the left vote was split. STV would allow "left" (and "right") to effectively vote as a block, without abandoning the important distinctions between the different individual parties - 9 more seats in legislature toward the 47% of Albertans who didn't vote PC.

It is true that any reform towards greater representation would take seats from the current party in power, and so it is always an uphill battle to get the government in power to enact such reforms. But it has happened in countries and regions not unlike ours. In fact, it happened right here in Alberta in 1926. But the reforms were discarded without public consultation in 1959 by a government keen to consolidate its own power. (I'm happy to say that that party, Social Credit, is all but extinct in Alberta - they haven't had a seat since 1982.)

And I'm not alone in being disappointed with the non-representative flaws in our representative democracy. Fair Vote Canada is campaigning for federal and provincial voting reform.

My question to everyone out there (Albertan or not) is this:

Is there a legitimate, ethically-justified defense for maintaining the current voting system, when the alternatives are easy, well-tested, and more representative (ie, more democratic) than what we have now?

* Alberta election data used here is taken from Wikipedia's comprehensive 2008 election page. Please let me know if my numbers are wrong.

Humanist Thoughts

BBC Radio 4 has a brief slot in the middle of the morning news called Thought For The Day. It's a pleasant diversion from the relentless barrage of information - a two-minute pause to consider a broader perspective on some event or issue that is current.

I really enjoyed listening to them, until I learned that non-religious speakers are excluded from the slot. There are many contributors - Christian ministers, Jewish rabbis, Sikhs, Muslims ... a real cross-section of British worldviews. Except for the 15-40% of British people who identify as non-religious.

Which is odd, because most of the thoughts talk about worldly concerns, and many don't explicitly invoke the religious beliefs of the speaker's particular tradition.

Humanists, some as prominent as Richard Dawkins have protested this completely arbitrary oversight, and have got absolutely no sympathy from the BBC.

As of last year, Humanists here in Scotland have taken matters into their own hands, starting the Thought For The World site (formerly "Think Humanist"). Last year, it was a single week of six podcast Thoughts by prominent British Humanists, broadcast over the week of Darwin Day. (Happy Darwin's birthday by the way. He'd be 199 years old today.)

This year, they've gathered more and are promising three weeks, fifteen Thoughts in all. The first two are already up and are good listening. There are some big names ahead, including AC Grayling (my favorite philosopher at the moment). But it sounds like there will also be some regular folks contributing too. I look forward to seeing if I know any of them, and listening to what they have to say.

And if you're a Humanist in Britain, why not consider contributing? Just jot down a Thought you would like to express (up to 400 words), record it (2 minutes or so), and submit it.

Let your voice be heard.

Language and the framing of popular science

Deena just showed me a very well-written article, "Watch your language", about the framing of science in public health. It looks at the issue of breastfeeding versus bottle-feeding infants, and how the language we use affects the perception of the alternatives in subtle but powerful ways.

The World Health Organization says on breastfeeding that:

Breastfeeding is the ideal way of providing young infants with the nutrients they need for healthy growth and development. Virtually all mothers can breastfeed, provided they have accurate information, and the support of their family and the health care system. Colostrum, the yellowish, sticky breast milk produced at the end of pregnancy, is recommended by WHO as the perfect food for the newborn, and feeding should be initiated within the first hour after birth. Exclusive breastfeeding is recommended up to 6 months of age.

According to a 2005 survey, only 8% of babies (less than 1 in 12) born in the UK are breastfed exclusively for the first six months, despite the fact that 84% of mothers "said they were aware of the health benefits of breastfeeding."

This seems to be typical of developed countries.

Why? Read the article. I suspect that the ideas presented there are transferable to other public science issues.

A humanist continuum

In a recent comment, Hugo brought up the fact that there are different factions within the community of humanism/freethought/atheism/brights/etc (the multitude of labels kind of says it all). And it can be difficult to bring us all together under one tent long enough to do something constructive.

In our little fledgling student society here in Edinburgh, we have few active members but they are scattered across the spectrum. One illustration of some of the more incendiary differences is how we view liberal believers.

If you (as a humanist) come across someone who self-identifies as Christian, but who acknowledges that God’s existence is not absolutely certain, and whose actions embody values you share – honesty, care for human beings, respect for science, concern for the environment – what is your attitude to that person?

Do you:

(a) feel they are being intellectually dishonest or inconsistent? If they are Christians, they should believe the Bible as it is written, not just take the “nice” bits and ignore the rest. If they can’t swallow the Bible whole, then they shouldn’t call themselves Christians at all. They should pick a belief system and be consistent, rather than trying to straddle incompatible worldviews.

Or do you:

(b) rejoice that, though religious, this person is not a threat to the secular society or to the things you most value as a humanist? You want a world where people uphold values like honesty, respect, and all the rest. It doesn’t matter if they do that while calling themselves humanists or Christians or Muslims or Pastafarians or whatever.

I hereby dub those who prefer option (a) the conversionists. The label matters as much as the beliefs, because sensible people using the label “Christian” simply provide cover for the nutcases who also use that label. If the content of their beliefs is humanist, they should convert to calling themselves “humanist” rather than “Christian”.

Those who take option (b) are the substantivists. It does not matter that someone calls herself a Christian, so long as the substance – her actual beliefs, values, and actions – include honesty, care for others, respect for science, and so on.

I tend to take the substantivist position. Our student humanist group had Christian students signing our form (we needed 20 student signatures) so we could become an official university society. “I’m not a humanist, but I support you in forming your society.” If they can do that without becoming humanists, then I think we can cooperate on other fronts too without feeling as though we need to convert them.

On the other hand, the conversionist idea that labels are important becomes very attractive to me when I’m told that my humanist values amount to belief in a god. (I’ve had this from a believer and from a non-believer). They don’t. A god is a very particular kind of being: omnipresent, powerful, intelligent, conscious. I don’t believe such a being exists. Trying to redefine god to prove that everyone believes in one is insulting both to most believers (who believe in something more than an amorphous “whatever” god) and to most nonbelievers (who tend to have well-considered reasons for their position).

My humanist friends here at both ends of the scale seem to agree with me that this distinction is useful. What do you think? Is it informative and helpful to identify conversionist and substantivist influences in the humanist community (or in yourself)? Or is this simply another way to divide us into smaller, weaker groups?

Belief and understanding

Two podcasts that I listen to regularly are Skepticality and Point of Inquiry. And both of them have recently done pieces featuring religious believers. Skepticality included as a large part of a recent podcast a speech that deist Hal Bidlack gave at The Amazing Meeting. Point of Inquiry featured an interview with human genome scientist and evangelical Christian Francis Collins.

I was nodding (and, at times, almost crying) throughout Bidlack's speech – it moved and inspired me.

The interview with Francis Collins, on the other hand, had me shaking my head and grinding my teeth. I couldn't believe that someone with such apparently superb scientific talent could trot out such an uninformed critique of the non-theistic worldview.

Now, I don't want this blog to become a place for me to rant about people I disagree with being stupid, and why, and where they can put their blankety-blank opinions. One of my values as a humanist is to focus on actions and consequences. Why does Collins bother me, while Bidlack doesn't? What do I want my reaction to accomplish? How can I help that come about?

First, self-understanding. Why does Collins bother me? He bothers me for the same reason that Richard Dawkins bothers him: because the thing he takes to be my worldview is in fact a caricature of how I actually see the world. He presents a simplistic, ill-thought-out atheism as though that is the best that millennia of skeptical philosophy and reason have to offer. When DJ Groethe suggests that there are more sophisticated ways of seeing the world naturalistically, Collins dismisses those as not being what most atheists hold. I wonder how many humanist gatherings he's gone to? I wonder how many non-theistic weddings or funerals he has attended? (Of course, this is exactly the response that Dawkins and others provoke from believers - including Collins. “That's not what I believe in. You're ignoring the more sophisticated theologians through history. Most people don't believe that any more.”)

So Collins irritates me because, when he talks about my beliefs, he misrepresents them.

Why doesn't Bidlack bother me? Because he doesn't mention my beliefs. Simple as that. His speech is about his own beliefs – their merits and their weaknesses – not about the merits or weaknesses he perceives in mine.

For this same reason, religious people are much less upset at Julia Sweeney's Letting Go of God or the book Parenting Beyond Belief (edited by Dale McGowan) than they are at the “evangelical atheist” books of Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, and others. It works both ways.

Second, the goals. What do I want my reaction to accomplish? Well, I would love for Francis Collins to learn more about my beliefs. Not necessarily to convert him – it'd be nice, but it's unlikely. More so that, next time he talks to someone, he doesn't misrepresent me and my fellow humanists. Also, I think he is ideally placed to influence the many religious believers, both in the US and elsewhere. The Baptists I know here in Edinburgh are more likely to be persuaded by Collins, a fellow evangelical, that evolution is a safe idea to believe and that ID isn't supportable, than they are to listen to me or even a qualified scientist like Dawkins telling them the same thing.

Finally, the means. How do I accomplish these goals? Well, I could rant about how wrong Collins is about so many things. But this would not incline him to listen to me, so my first goal would fail. And it wouldn't have any positive effect on other believers' uptake of the constructive side of his message. All it would do is give me some emotional release, and I can get that just ranting with my fellow humanists in private. Alternatively, I could try something more constructive.

I could recommend that Francis Collins (and any other religious person who wants to speak from knowledge rather than ignorance) read one of the many excellent introductions to the humanist perspective. Richard Norman's On Humanism is an easy read, and is gentler toward believers than Dawkins or Harris. (It's the book that introduced me to humanism as an organized and coherent worldview, rather than just a disparate list of things I already happened to believe, so I recommend it to people new to humanism too.) Julian Baggini's What's It All About? is an excellent exploration of the meaning of life by a humanist philosopher. Julia Sweeney's Letting Go of God monologue is excellent, so order the CDs, Dr. Collins.

As for how to help Dr. Collins influence other evangelicals positively, if a religious person expresses doubts about (or interest in) evolution, I can point them to his book. It has a far better chance of being read with an open mind (and thus influencing them) than Hitchens or Harris, or even the relatively gentle and thoughtful Dawkins.

Okay, I think I've managed to avoid ranting and be constructive. Perhaps I'll wrap up this post here. I have to confess, it takes effort and attention to focus on what I want to accomplish with a reaction, rather than just to react. Good humanist lesson, though.

A new perspective

I'll bet everyone who starts a new blog feels like, at last, their under-represented perspective will have a presence on the web.

Well, me too.

This is a humanist blog from a non-American perspective.

What's special about that?

Well, Hemant Mehta's excellent Friendly Atheist blog gives a positive humanist perspective - ie, it's not all about what's wrong with religion.

But he is American, so much of what concerns him centres on the American crisis of the religious takeover of the officially secular government. While interesting, that does not bear on my life so much as, for example, my home country allowing same-sex marriage (yay Canada!), or my current country of residence continuing to run one of its two legislative houses democracy-free (no elections in the UK House of Lords) - complete with a cadre of bishops from the established church.

I want to present a slightly more international perspective. But honestly, news about the humanist "cause" isn't the most important thing in my life as a humanist. Humanism is a way to guide my daily life in a more sensible way than I otherwise would. I hope to convey some of that in this blog.