Your choice to attend religious services? Apparently not.

Freedom of expression is an important right, as has been highlighted in recent days with the Charlie Hebdo affair. But what about the freedom not to attend a religious service?

Skepticule host Paul Orton explains the case of Anonymous Steve (a Skepticule contributor), who has been ordered by a judge to attend Roman Catholic Mass with his children:

Steve, a British citizen of my acquaintance, has been instructed by a British judge to attend Roman Catholic mass with his children when he has custody of them, as part of a divorce settlement.

The instruction to attend church* was something the judge introduced without being requested by the mother. The judge declared his Roman Catholicism to the court. The children only occasionally attended church with their mother before the divorce.

Steve appealed the judgement as far as he could as a breach of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) but the Appeals Court has ruled that the original ruling should not be overturned. This would appear to set a precedent whereby it is in the remit of the British court system to demand that citizens attend services of a particular denomination.

Steve chooses not to take his children to mass, thereby leaving himself open to a charge of Contempt of Court and a prison sentence.

Read more on Paul Orton's blog, Missing God Gene.

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*UPDATE 2015-01-17: "court" corrected to "church"

Book review: Losing My Religion by William Lobdell

William Lobdell's compulsive autobiography is an honest, open chronicle of his conversion to evangelical Christianity — and his subsequent de-conversion as a result of his exhaustive journalistic investigation of religion. His book's subtitle, How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America — and Found Unexpected Peace, accurately describes the arc of his story. We see how he became enamoured of Christianity, and how the church of his choice didn't quite live up to his expectations, and how he nevertheless reconciled his misgivings and embraced his faith.

We read of his perseverance in pursuit of his dream job, eventually landing the post of religion writer for the Los Angeles Times. And by his own account he seems to have been very good at that job. But still the church didn't quite meet his needs, and he decided to become a Roman Catholic. Even while undergoing special Catholic training classes he continued his investigative journalism, often into priest-paedophilia. At the very moment he was due to be formally accepted into the Catholic Church, he was breaking a big story of Catholic priests sexually abusing children in their care. Nagging doubts that hadn't been of too much concern now rose to the surface and he decided to delay his official conversion. The appalling catalogue he helped to unveil continued to grow, and as it did so his faith dwindled, until eventually there was nothing left of it.

Losing My Religion is a page-turner that grips from beginning to end. It's an honest description of what it's like to fall into religion, and out of it again, and on the way we discover the true horror of the Catholic-priest-paedophilia scandal in America.

(On Sunday January 31st 2010, William Lobdell was interviewed by Mary Hynes on CBC Radio's Tapestry programme. Tapestry is available as a podcast — also for iTunes. The mp3 audio of this edition is available for direct download via Castroller.)

Lobdell, W. (2009) Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America — and Found Unexpected Peace, New York: HarperCollins; ISBN 978-0-06-162681-4; hardcover $25.99

If you're opposed to faith schools, should you work for them?

(I've been meaning to write this post for a while. It concerns a matter of integrity and could possibly brand me a hypocrite.)

I'm not in favour of faith schools. I think they are ideologically divisive and work against integrating different cultures into society at large. Isolating children in a learning culture that explicitly excludes those of different ethnic, cultural or religious origins may reinforce a specific social heritage, but it also encourages an undesirable "them and us" attitude. A particularly illustrative example is that of Northern Ireland where sectarian strife has been inculcated into generations of schoolchildren, leading to inter-faith violence that remains difficult to eradicate.

At the same time I understand why caring parents tend to favour faith schools: the standards of behaviour and academic achievement in those schools appear in general to be higher than in non-faith schools. The perceived differential, however, is less to do with the disputable benefits of faith-based education than with faith schools' use of a form of selection; faith schools, on the pretext of a religious test of applicants (actually of their parents), are able to screen out pupils who would tend to lower their averages.

So I think there's a good case for saying that faith schools are unfairly catering for a privileged elite, and the extra feature — religious indoctrination — is just an additional undesirable add-on.

I don't believe faith schools are in general a good idea. But in my day job I deal with faith schools — specifically, voluntary aided Catholic primary (and a few secondary) schools — providing services that are paid for 90% by the state and 10% by the church. I could therefore say that if 85% of my living comes from work in faith schools, 8.5% of that living is funded by the church.

Doesn't this run counter to my ethical principles? Am I not supporting the idea of faith schools by not quitting my job and finding something else to do?

Not necessarily.

The people who benefit from my work are the pupils, and to some extent the teachers. Improving conditions and facilities for children aged 4 to 11 (or 15 in the case of secondary schools), who are unlikely to have had any say in where they go to school, is a matter of making a difference where one can. The pupils and teachers are not responsible for the system, and meanwhile children need to be educated.

The indoctrination aspect is of course a concern to me. The schools I visit display religious imagery — and there's plenty of stuff about Jesus, as one would expect from Catholic schools, but I'm pleased to report that I've never seen any creationist nonsense. I'd heard that the Catholics don't like Harry Potter, but my observations indicate otherwise. The preponderance of religious ritual in these schools, however, is worrying — in the case of primary schools this is definitely indoctrination of children too young to know what's being done to them. Visiting a Catholic primary school on the day of First Communion is a disturbing experience (and goes some way to explaining the incidence of paedophilia in the Catholic priesthood — but that's probably best left to another blog-post).

If these schools didn't exist I would hope to be providing the same services to secular state schools — it's an accident of my employment that the firm I work for has connections with the Catholic Church, whose local administrators turn to us for professional services.

Ultimately it comes down to this: I'm against faith schools because although they may be giving children a good academic education, they do a disservice by indoctrinating them with religious dogma that's incapable of objective substantiation, and they are socially divisive. If I can improve their conditions to the extent that their environment is more conducive to learning in general, I hope the children will get an even better academic education, as a result of which they'll have a better chance, as they grow older, of seeing through the religious nonsense.

Being as it were on the inside, I also get to see how one particular denomination of faith-based education operates. It's far from ideal, but I believe I can live (and work) with it.

Non-overlapping scepticism

Within what might loosely be called the sceptical community there is a faction holding that scepticism should be confined to matters of "woo-woo" – in general such things as alternative medicine, astrology, lay-lines, dowsing, claims of psychic ability, spiritual mediumship, alien abduction and so forth, and should not be concerned with religion. Daniel Loxton, editor of Junior Skeptic, in his 2007 essay "Where Do We Go From Here?" – an impassioned rallying cry to sceptical endeavour – suggested that the atheism/theism debate was diverting scepticism from its true concerns, and urged a return to those concerns. (Incidentally you can hear him deliver the essay in episode 63 of the Skepticality podcast. Note also that there is now a follow-up publication, "What Do I Do Next?")

To me, this partitioning of religious scrutiny has a flavour of Stephen Jay Gould's non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA), an idea suggesting that science and religion are separate disciplines addressing different things: science being concerned with the material, physical realities of the universe, and religion with the spiritual, moral aspects of human life. I find this to be a false distinction, and it can be seen as such by looking at religious claims (and their tacit assumptions). For example the Catholic Church recently complained that Reiki, a form of "energy healing", isn't backed up by scientific evidence. It's hard to believe that those Catholics behind this statement don't see the huge irony of what they are saying.

From the scientific point of view NOMA would be just fine – science isn't concerned with the spiritual or moral aspects of life. At least, not until religion attempts its own overlapping on to the scientific side – which it does all the time (see the Catholics' objections to embryonic stem-cell research, or the Pope's claim that condom use increases the incidence of HIV in Africa, for example). NOMA is all very well, but "you leave us alone, we'll leave you alone" only works if both sides play by the rules. They don't, and the biggest offender is the religious side.

Science, I admit, does encroach on to the "spiritual" side occasionally, but usually only as a result of specific challenges. Scientists have little incentive to keep to their own side when religion is so blatant about not doing so itself.

Another problem with confining scepticism, as a movement, to "woo-woo" is the tricky matter of delineation. Does excluding religion also exclude spiritual mediumship? I think it does. But the existence of communicating spirits, or of ghosts in general (or faeries, or aliens for that matter) are clearly matters warranting scientific investigation. As is, therefore, the existence of a god.

Jerry Coyne fueled the debate recently with a blog-post entitled "Truckling to the Faithful: A Spoonful of Jesus Helps Darwin Go Down" in which he took issue with the US National Academy of Science and the National Center for Science Education's "accommodationist" stance regarding the compatibility of science and religion.

Coyne's post may be incendiary, but when we're dealing with what's true and what's false, clouding the issues with equivocation will be ultimately counterproductive.

Fantasy on a Thursday night: Apparitions - BBC1

Utter tosh or serious religious fiction?

Apparently the new high-profile drama Apparitions, starring Martin Shaw, was originally scheduled for the beginning of this year, but is only now appearing on UK TV screens:

http://www.sfx.co.uk/page/sfx?entry=exclusive_interview_joe_ahearne_on

It's earnest stuff, judging by the first two episodes, with plenty of gore and special effects, but it has a problem with credibility. Being based on Catholicism, it inevitably elicits rolled eyes as the main characters come out with religious nonsense as if it were established fact. Martin Shaw plays a Catholic priest who moonlights as an exorcist - naturally he's very good, playing it as Judge John Deed in a dog collar.

It will be interesting to see whether the Catholic Church denounces the show. I have a feeling it won't. It didn't denounce the film The Exorcist, and probably rightly so, as everything in that film ought to have reinforced any Catholic's faith.

And if the Catholic Church doesn't denounce Apparitions, are we to interpret that as tacit approval - that the things it portrays are in line with Catholic doctrine?

Scotland on the way to theocracy?

BBC Radio 4 Today (Thursday, May 31):

"The head of the Catholic Church in Scotland, Cardinal Patrick O'Brien, will today warn Catholic politicians they can't remain full members of the church if they support abortion. We speak to the Bishop of Paisley."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/listenagain/ram/today5_20070531.ram
Piece starts 18'18" into the clip (duration approx 4'10")


Download RealPlayer here

We don't have separation of Church and State here in Britain, so I suppose this kind of thing is to be expected.