ChristopherWhite.info

So, if I signed a contract of employment that stipulated a dress code, and then chose to ignore it, I’d probably be disciplined.

But if I signed a contract of employment that stipulated a dress code, and then chose to ignore it because of my personal beliefs, I’d get paid £8,500.

Right…

Really this is about direct and indirect discrimination:

Direct discrimination

You have the right not to be treated less favourably than someone else (eg not being promoted) because of your religion or belief, your perceived religion or belief, or the religion or belief of people you associate with.

However, direct discrimination is allowed where religious belief is a necessary requirement for the job. For example, a Roman Catholic school may be able to restrict applications for a scripture teacher to baptized Catholics.

Indirect discrimination

You have the right not to be disadvantaged by a policy at work because of your religion or belief. If you’re a devout Muslim or Sikh for example, a head-covering policy for all employees could discriminate against you.

This kind of indirect discrimination may be unlawful, whether or not its done on purpose. Its only allowed if its necessary for the way the business works.

Direct discrimination — ok, it’s not cricket. But “indirect discrimination” is not discrimination.In the example given from DirectGov, the head-covering policy applies to all empoyees. If people feel that they cannot comply with it then that is their choice.

As another example, my uncle drives a lorry, and delivers to supermarkets. At one of these supermarkets he often has to unload the booze orders himself, because one of the employees that is supposed to unload the delivery is Muslim and refuses even to touch alcohol.

Personal beliefs, or that nebulous concept “religion”, are not a good enough excuse to simply refuse to do one’s job.

Terry Sanderson ends that CIF piece with:

It should now be OK to say: “Leave your religion at the door, please. And if you won’t and your religion doesn’t permit you to work in the way that this jobs demands you do, then please find another job that will.”

Yes, yes it should. Otherwise, “religion”, “personal beliefs”, or however one chooses to phrase it, simply translates as: “The rules do not apply to me.”

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This has just made me very happy.

Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris in two hours of discussion on religion.

Video available here. DVD out on monday, with proceeds going to the Ayaan Hirsi Ali Security Trust.

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Yesterday evening I picked up a copy of the current New Statesman to read on the train home from London, and found a great example of something that’s been annoying me for a while.

Page 42 of the magazine is home to this piece by Richard Dawkins (pbuh). Its standfirst contains the expression “son of God”, complete with those distancing quote marks that are entirely appropriate to a contentious and not universally accepted claim.

Shame, then, that just four pages earlier the same treatment wasn’t given to a reference to Mohammed as a “Prophet”, which is presented as uncontested fact.

Sure, a “proliferation” of quote marks can become (as my old tutor put it) “very tedious” (or just ridiculous, like “this”), but isn’t presenting a point of view as fact something that journalism is never supposed to do?

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Yesterday I found myself scribbling about the discrepancy between what those of a religious bent actually believe and what is written in their “holy” books, using CS Lewis as a fairly lighthearted example. (You’ll read it in good time, I’m sure.)

He’s a good choice, between the all-too-obvious Christian supposition in the Chronicles of Narnia and his trinity of apologetics, Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, and Miracles. Christopher Hitchens describes him in God Is Not Great as “the most popular Christian apologist” and “the main chosen propaganda vehicle for Christianity in our time”.

Odd, then, that — as has just occurred to me — he might, in the strict sense, not have actually Believed, but taken Pascal’s wager.

In The Silver Chair, the sixth and penultimate book of the Chronicles series, the three adventurers — Jill, Eustace and Puddleglum the Marsh-wiggle — are held captive in an underground realm, along with the lost prince Rilian. Its Queen attempts to persuade them - with the help of a bit of magic, naturally - that the Sun, Aslan the Lion and Narnia are dreams or fabrications. Regaining his “senses”, Puddleglum responds:

“Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things — trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.”

Wish-thinking, pure and simple.

And in the final book of the series, The Last Battle — a Narnian apocalypse tale — Aslan is picking people worthy of entering Narnia 2.0, the paradise version. Among the saved is a soldier from Calormen, Narnia’s enemy to the south, who makes it to paradise despite worshiping a different god.

Given the above, one could read that as Lewis wrestling with his own doubts, reassuring himself that Unbelievers can still make it into heaven despite the biblical claim the only route to “salvation” is through Jesus — letting himself off for his own wavering.

Wish-thinking piled on wish-thinking.

(And all the more credible since Lewis was “rescued” from atheism by his devoutly Catholic friend Tolkien.)

Quite what I’m getting at, I have no idea. But the possibility that the most notorious Christian propagandist of our age was so doubtful is intriguing nonetheless.

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Khaled Diab is rapidly becoming one of my favorite contributors to Comment Is Free¹. And on his personal blog², I rather liked this, following a debate with some sort of fundamentalist in the Finsbury Park area:

He conceded that I had a point. Depressed by the state of sexual liberty in people’s minds, I cheered myself up by with the thought that I’d dropped a small sex bomb into their cosy bigotry. Ahh, when the sexual revolution comes, they’ll realise that making love makes the world a better place.

Lessons in how to talk to those with Conviction there. Perhaps, should Andy and I ever again stop for a late-night chat with Christian evangelists they won’t tell us how much they’d like to kill us.
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1 With apologies to the estimable Dave Hill
2 On which it would appear that I disagree with Mr Diab about Borat.

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Today - Easter Sunday - seems an appropriate day to have discovered that one of the scheduled debates for this year’s Hay Festival is “Is Islam compatible with democracy?”, for the simple reason that perhaps a better question might be: “Is Christianity compatible with democracy?”

After all, Jesus Himself had such scant regard for the wishes of the people that He didn’t even have the good grace to stay dead.

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More idiocy from the Northern Echo’s letters pages:

“AMONG the list of “vestigial structures” that Chris White cites as “remnants of evolution” is the coccyx (”tail bone”); obviously believing that humans at one time had tails.

Supposing we had had tails: who or what decided we should now not have them; and why did that decision/natural selection/evolutionary process affect all humans, causing all to be without tails?

Surely some humans would have found them very useful and would have wished to retain them. So why has the whole human race evolved with such uniformity? For there is not a single human being living or recorded in history as having a tail.

The theory of evolution is based on tales, not on fact. There is no fossil evidence or any other evidence to support this assumption. - Colin G Farquhar”

Observing that we have a tail bone doesn’t imply that I think that human beings once had tails any more than six-week-old foetuses’ gills suggest that we used to be able to breathe underwater. Our ancestors had tails. This is rather different.

As for why that evolutionary process should affect all humans: it, for whatever reason, confers a survival/mating advantage and increases the probability of No Tail to [survive long enough to] be able to breed and pass down the No Tail gene. That’s the entire basis of Darwin’s theory, which Mr Farquhar evidently doesn’t grasp.

As for no fossil evidence to support evolution - well, maybe not on his planet…

The thing is, this isn’t even the worst misunderstanding of evolution that I’ve heard. That accolade goes to a street preacher (why are they invariably creationists) I was having a chat with a couple of months ago. He couldn’t understand how - particularly given his A-Level in psycology - that humans all across the world came down from the trees at the same time and just happen to think in the same way.

I pointed out that, actually, humans came down from the trees all in Africa and then spread out across the world. He wasn’t listening.

It’s such a beautiful theory if people bother to try to understand it. But they don’t.

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That Radio 4 programme Telling Muslim Stories [transcript] that I shamelessly plugged in the previous post made me think about something that’s been irking me for a while now: Religion as an excuse not to do things.
Times deputy editor Ben Preston said that:

I mean only last week I was floating down the news cue for the day and saw a story which came in about whether Muslims were making it more dificult to control superbugs in hospital because devout Muslims don’t like to wash their hands in hospitals with anything that uses alcohol. That’s not a story that would have appeared on anyone’s agenda a year ago.

Doctors wilfully putting patients at risk isn’t newsworthy?

The reasons behind it are irrelevant: if a doctor isn’t willing to follow procedure and is increasing risk to patients he shouldn’t be working in a hospital. That it’s his religion isn’t a good enough excuse. If your religion forbids you from doing your job properly, then don’t take the job.

When I “worked” in the Welsh Assembly I didn’t bother familiarising myself with their equal opps rules. But I did come across the following in my Students’ Union’s constitution the other day, on “indirect discrimination”:

“Indirect discrimination occurs when a requirement or condition is applied to a person and that person is excluded from some benefit or subjected to a detriment because he or she cannot comply with the requirement or condition.”

I imagine it’s much the same everywhere else.

If that requirement is Doing Your Job Properly, then it’s against the rules to refuse to employ somebody who can’t do their job properly if the reason that they can’t do their job properly is their religion.

It’s a bit unfair on secular incompetents.

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A very kind producer at the BBC has alerted me to a programme on Radio 4 tonight, Telling Muslim Stories. The beeb’s website says:

“This year it seemed that every time you switched on a news bulletin, there was story about Muslims.

“Journalists have been covering terrorism in Muslim communities for some time, but in 2006 they took on wider aspects of Muslim culture itself - from the way some Muslim women dress to the protests over the Danish cartoons.

“But has all this coverage turned Muslims off the mainstream media? And does it matter if it has?

“In Analysis this week Charlie Beckett, Director of the Polis journalism think tank at LSE, asks why this has happened and explores the wider questions raised about the political and moral state of British journalism.”

They’ve got a pretty stellar ensemble: al-Jazeera and ex-BBC Rageh Omar, Channel Four News’s Samira Ahmed, Times deputy editor Ben Preston and New Statesman political editor Martin Bright among them. And Madeleine Bunting.

It sounds like an interesting listen.

(Though I did have to chuckle at the BBC website’s article, which says “Telling Muslim Stories, was broadcast on Thursday, 28 December, 2006 at 20:30 BST.” - no wonder the licence fee’s so high if they’ve been inventing time travel.)

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“It’s a common misconception, held by all truly stupid people.” - Kryten to the Cat, Red Dwarf series five. (I was, coincidentally, watching this today.)
I imagine many misconceptions are pretty common. Try this one:

Reporting on a case of parthenogenesis (or “self-fertilisation”) in a Komodo dragon, National Geographic have taken the opportunity for a nice, Christmassy “virgin birth” story. They’ve quoted Chester Zoo’s curator of lower vertebrates, Kevin Buley, as saying:

“Essentially what we have here is an immaculate conception.”

Which I guess in one sense is true, but only in as far as all animal conceptions are “immaculate”.

Immaculate conception doesn’t refer to the alleged virgin birth of the alleged son of god, but to the theory that at the time of Mary’s conception god allegedly intervened to keep her soul free from the stain of original sin, as a sinless life was necessary for her to bear Jesus.[1]

Who’s more foolish - the fool that said it, or the fool that printed it?

Ok, it’s not that important a distinction in the grand scam of things, particularly given what an absolute crock the whole story is anyway. But even I know this particular piece of Roman Catholic dogma, and probably the only person more anti-religion than me is flatmate Andy, who actually requested excommunication.

Those readers that know me[2] will be used to my misanthropy, but the general level of popular ignorance is beginning to frustrate me immensely (and I recognise that this is just intellectual snobbery, but there you go…). Having become mostly bored [3] of arguing on Comment Is Free, I’ve been sending the odd letter to The Northern Echo.

Some of the paper’s readers write in with “facts” so wildly inaccurate they’d make even Polly Toynbee blush, so I occasionally put my incredibly large knowledge base[4] to use disabusing them (for which read: pedantically pointing out mistakes[5]).

Unfortunately, the Echo’s features editor keeps cutting out comments such as “…as you would know had you availed yourself of the facts before commenting” and “…as the correspondent would be aware had they ever bothered to look it up”.[6]

Fair enough. It’s their paper and they can do what they like, and such remarks are perhaps gratuitous. But it’s a shame, because I firmly believe most of the world’s problems could be solved if people just bothered to sit down and actually read a book once in a while. Or at least we could have an intelligent discussion, without comments such as this made by some kid (who, it has to be said, was on my side) arguing with a street preacher: “They can’t have written down the Bible - they didn’t have any pencils.”

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1. Quite why a chap allegedly born 2000 years ago in Roman Judaea, who in all probability spoke Aramaic, would have a Spanish name is beyond me. I’ve heard him (not “Him”, thank you…) referred to as “Yeshua of Nazareth”, and one would think that the closest corresponding name is Joshua. Wikipedia says that: “The name “Jesus” is an Anglicization of the Greek Iesous, itself believed to be a transliteration of the Hebrew/Aramaic Yeshua or Yehoshua, meaning “YHWH is salvation”. I bet he got bullied for that name.
2. Which is all of them, bar those stumbling across this site looking for dead/imprisoned friends, the spambots, and Mickel’s dad. (More on statcounter trawling later…)
3. Please don’t look at this in Internet Explorer. I uploaded it to the school’s content managment system while working in Firefox, and, due to supreme idiocy, forgot to check it looked alright in IE. It doesn’t. At all.
4. Wikipedia.
5. As an example, one particularly stupid woman, responding to an earlier letter, claimed that Islamic terrorist couldn’t possibly have anything to with western foreign policy, as the twin tower attacks were before Afghanistan and Iraq. I pointed out that continued agression against Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War was cited by Osama Bin Laden in his 1998 fatwa as one of the crimes of America, as she would have known had she informed herself before forming an opinion.
6. Yes, I’m aware that I have myself come out with some severely malinformed nonsense. I’ve already admitted it.

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