Britain is no more a Christian nation than a White nation

Coel Hellier reflects on what the reaction would be if David Cameron had described Britain as a "White country":

Britain is no more a Christian nation than a White nation | coelsblog

If Britain is a Christian nation then it is also a White nation. The majority of the population is white and our history and cultural heritage are predominantly White. Nearly all of our institutions and our cultural traditions derive from people who were white.

Once again we have a demonstration of why secularism is the obvious way to go.

Why religious taboos need to be broken

More on the Charlie Hebdo affair, from Coel Hellier. It's full of nuggets:

Free speech is not an end in itself, we value it because we use it to examine and criticize influential ideas.

That's the point; Islam is influential. If it weren't influential we wouldn't bother with it.

The Islamic ban on drawing Mohammed is a theological taboo. The whole idea is to place Mohammed, and thus Islam, above human criticism. Drawing Mohammed is seen as disrespectful because it involves the drawer thinking for themselves about Mohammed and possibly coming to un-Islamic conclusions.

Organised religion does this kind of thing very well. Over the centuries religion has managed to insulate itself from criticism in such a way that the very notion that religion might be somehow incorrect about something has become abhorrent to many otherwise sensible people.

...we have a moral duty to question Islam, and that means a moral duty to flout the Islamic taboos that are there precisely to prevent us doing that. 

That looks like a call to action.

The cartoons drawn by Charlie Hebdo are not offensive by any proper standard — they are mild compared to those directed routinely at Western politicians — they are offensive only by the standards of a taboo that is there to protect Islam from scrutiny.

We simply cannot accept this taboo, since it conflicts with the basic principles that have raised the free West to the highest standards of economic prosperity, political freedom, and quality of life that the world has ever known. It is impermissible to try to impose one’s own religious rules onto other people, by means of taking “offense”, since that is to subject others to one’s own religion, which is exactly what Islam would like to do. 

Coel also highlights the dire plight of indigenous apostates such as Raif Badawi, sentenced to 1000 lashes for hosting a website critical of Islam:

If we in the West accept Islamic taboos, and acquiesce to Islamic strictures, then how can the Raif Badawis be expected to challenge Islam? To refuse to publish Mohammed cartoons is to say that the reformers are in the wrong! Surely we should stand in support of those who want to reform Islamic society from the inside.

Good points, clearly expressed — go read the whole thing.

In search of the Absolute Shouldness Scale

Now that the holiday's frenetic activity is over (giving way to the new year's frenetic activity), I've found time to catch up on some older blogposts marked for later reading. One such is from the excellent coelsblog by Coel Hellier, Professor of Astrophysics at Keele University. In "Science can answer morality questions" he gives a clear explanation of why any attempt to ground morality in some kind of transcendent power is doomed to failure.

Perhaps the biggest red-herring in mankind’s history has been the quest for the false grail of Absolute Ethics, the idea that there is an Absolute Shouldness Scale, and that if we could consult the scale we would know for sure whether we “should” do X or “should” do Y or “should not” do Z.

Well, there isn’t. At least, no-one has ever found one, nor has anyone produced a coherent account of how such a scale could have arisen or even what it would mean. While some might want to regard “shouldness” as one of the fundamental properties of the universe, along with gravitational mass or electric charge, they have produced no good reason for so thinking.

Naturally this won't sit well with those who believe morality is God-given, but the evidence for transcendent morality just isn't there.

Thus there is nothing Absolute about our moral senses, they are cobbled together to be effective enough for the job, in the same way that our livers, lungs, immune systems and visual systems have been cobbled together as effective enough to do their job. Further, we do not need an Absolute ethical system, any more than we need an Absolute immune system or an Absolute liver; a functional one is quite sufficient.

Morality, it seems — much to the annoyance of the religious — is actually about what works, and nothing to do with any gods.

The commonest attempt to establish an Absolute Shouldness Scale is to embody it in a god: “It is right because my god says so”. Since our moral senses are human moral senses, it makes sense to try to embody them in an Absolute version of a human, imagining God in man’s own image, as a idealised tribal patriarch. By doing so one can ignore the reality — that religions get their morality from people — and claim instead that people get their morality from religion.

Unfortunately, any attempt at establishing Divine Ethics suffers from fatal flaws, the most blatant being that there is no evidence for any such divine being. Equally problematic is that it doesn’t actually explain morality. Just saying “it’s a property of god” is not an explanation, it is accepting morality without explanation. By contrast, an emergence of morality in social animals, as evolutionary programming to facilitate cooperation, explains what morality is and where it comes from.

It's heartening to read honest attempts by concerned individuals to establish the nature and origins of morality, in contrast to the dismissive attitude of those religionists who just want to crib their morals from a dubious book. I consider coelsblog to be one of the best discoveries of 2011.