Censorship, science and religion

The recent news about the banning, by the Vatican, of commentary and opinion being published by a number of Catholic priests in Ireland initially invoked in your blogger the reaction that it was an internal matter for the Church, with which he wants nothing to do.

A moment’s reflection, of course, determined that the same church still impinges greatly on the lives even of those who would shun it completely, nowhere more than in the matter of the education of one’s children and eventual grandchildren. The Catholic Church still controls and manages over 90% of state funded primary schools in Ireland. Therefore citizens are often constrained to send their children to one of these schools as the only means of them getting a primary education, as was the case with our family when we lived in rural Ireland. You tend to take the view that it will be all right - sure everyone is in the same boat, and this is not exactly the middle ages.

But it wasn’t all right. Our daughter, who dearly loves her father, for all his faults, was made to suffer serious anguish in the belief that he was destined to hell because, as she was aware, he had decided that there was no god. Her mother seems to have eased her mind by getting her to agree that, even though Dad didn’t believe, he was still a good man, so he would avoid hell. The whole episode generates great anger, even now. Thinking about it, it’s lucky she wasn’t in a Lutheran school. Martin Luther taught that good works were not enough. The only way to he ‘saved’, for him, was to believe.

There are other reasons why religion in schools is pernicious. It has the capacity to undermine the teaching of scientific principles, for one. In the words of Richard Dawkins, in his book “The God Delusion”:

“Fundamentalist religion is hell-bent on ruining the scientific education of countless thousands of innocent, well-meaning, eager young minds. Non-fundamentalist, ‘sensible’ religion may not be doing that. But it is making the world safe for fundamentalism by teaching children, from their earliest years, that unquestioning faith is a virtue”.

And how far away is the Catholic Church from fundamentalism when we are hearing that the Vatican has taken steps to curtail freedom of expression on the part of some of its priests? This has to mean that the same culture of repression will pervade the state schools that the Church manages. For someone who sees the ability to criticise and to bring forward new ideas as an essential part of living, this is bad news indeed.

Richard Dawkins’s book is well worth reading, for anyone. However, it is especially relevant to those priests that have been silenced by the Vatican. Dawkins is a world class intellectual. At the very least, priests, such as those who have been victims of Vatican authoritarianism, should be able to address the points he makes. It is available from Amazon.co.uk, here. 

Science, Magic and Religion

The Internet truly is wonderful. Today I’d like to introduce readers to the possibility of viewing a complete undergraduate course at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), entitled “Science, Magic and Religion”, which is presented to us by Professor Courtenay Raia.

One would need to have a deep interest in the subject and/or rather a lot of time at his or her disposal in order to watch the whole course. However, the introduction video is well worth viewing, all by itself.

It is easy to imagine that it is only in relatively recent times that a clear distinction has arisen between the three elements in the title of this course: Isaac Newton, who discovered gravity, who defined mechanics and the laws of motion that bear his name, and who invented the Calculus, was an ordained clergyman who spent a good deal of his time practicing alchemy, the means by which many people of his day believed base metal could be turned into gold. Johann Kepler, who developed the laws that define the motion of the planets in their orbits around the Sun, had a steady sideline in the preparation of astrological charts which were supposed to tell the fortune of the person who commissioned them. In the Middle Ages astrology was taken so seriously that it was made a capital offence for anyone to attempt to tell the fortune of the King of England.

These videos have an added bonus in that Professor Raia is a joy to watch. She’s a supremely confident lecturer who uses her hands, in particular, to beautiful effect.

Certainty

Recently a good friend posted a link on facebook to a TED talk by one Brene Brown, of whom I had never heard, although I was familiar with TED. This is a website that contains talks on various subjects either by well known people, such as Jane Fonda and Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, or by lesser known but nevertheless well qualified specialists in their fields. TED is worth a browse at any time, just for its own sake.

Brene Brown’s talk, which is linked here, was well worth watching. I found that when I listened to it again, I got more from it. A key point of the presentation was that absolute certainty, in anything, is a major problem and a big mistake.

On December 15th last we woke up to the news that Christopher Hitchens had died. It was not unexpected as he had been battling with a serious form of cancer for about 18 months and it was known that he was not likely to survive. I have read most, if not all, of his books and I recently revisited the one for which he is perhaps best known, called “God is not great” (my copy is signed by the author, who I had the pleasure of briefly meeting when he debated religion with John Waters in the Gate Theatre in Dublin in 2008).

The following is an excerpt from the book:

‘Religion is man made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did. Still less can they hope to tell us the “meaning” of later discoveries and developments which were, when they began, either obstructed by their religions or denounced by them. And yet – the believers still claim to know! Not just to know, but to know everything. Not just to know that god exists, and that he created and supervised the whole enterprise, but also to know what “he” demands of us – from our diet to our observances to our sexual morality. In other words, in a vast and complicated discussion where we know more and more about less and less, yet can still hope for some enlightenment as we proceed, one faction – itself composed of mutually warring factions – has the sheer arrogance to tell us that we already have all the information we need. Such stupidity, combined with such pride, should be enough to exclude “belief” from the debate. The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs to the infancy of our species. It may be a long farewell but it has begun and, like all farewells, should not be protracted”.

After such words, nobody can be under any illusion that Christopher Hitchens or those, such as myself, who agree with him, can themselves be certain about their positions. All we can do is maintain that an explanation of how the world came into being that does not rely on a supreme creator is one that works for us. 

I have come across many who are deeply religious and who use this as the backdrop for living exemplary lives. These tend to be the religious people who do not attempt to persuade me to their way of thinking, and I’m more than happy to recognise that theirs is the solution to life’s complexity that works for them. I certainly have no interest in winning them over to my position on the matter. Where problems arise is where believers feel they have to proselytize – where they arrogantly think, for whatever reason, that everyone they meet should be “given the opportunity” to conform to their philosophy. Is this because they're insecure in their beliefs and need the reassurance that numbers of like-minded people can give? Do they feel threatened by those who insist on rational explanations and who hold, as Cicero did, that what is incapable of happening never happened, and what is capable of happening is not a miracle?

And there are those people of religion who would insist that they are not proselytizers, such as the RC Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, but whose actions do not match their words. The Archbishop certainly comes across as a reasonable man. He is on record as saying that lapsed Catholics “should have the maturity” to leave the church. He is, one might think, the acceptable face of Irish Catholicism. That is until we realise that he and his colleagues insist on having what is known as the integrated curriculum in Irish state funded national schools, of which, for historical reasons, they manage well over 90%. The integrated curriculum means that Catholic doctrine is not just confined to religion classes but permeates all subjects throughout the school day. The end result is that parents who do not want their children indoctrinated but who have no alternative primary school to which to send them and who are, after all, part of the body of taxpayers who provide the funding for the schools, are forced to put up with what is a totally unacceptable situation. It means that not only does the Catholic Church proselytize, but it insists on having as its target audience those who, because they are children, are by definition immature, with their critical and cognitive faculties still only in formation.

It must come to an end. The only certainty should be that there are no certainties.