Well, he might do:

Scientist Richard Dawkins, an atheist known worldwide for arguing against the existence of God, has described himself as a “cultural Christian”.

He told the BBC’s Have Your Say that he did not want to “purge” the UK of its Christian heritage.

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If you haven’t heard that St. Martins-in-the-Fields stopped Cristina Odone from using their pulpit to rant about how religious people are persecuted last week, you simply haven’t been paying attention. She was banging on about it on the Today programme and now has a column in the Observer saying the same thing:

When a Christian cannot speak out in church for fear of censure, alarm bells ring. The citadel that threatens to emerge from this new world order is like Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials in reverse: the dogmatic oppressor is no longer the omnipotent church, but the omnipotent secularist clique that demands total conformity.

What a very silly person. I have no idea what the capacity of St. Martins-in-the-Fields is but doubt it has a capacity of more than 1,000. By contrast, in going on about this via every media outlet available to her, she has had contact with millions. It was a church that banned her, not the high priesthood of Richard Dawkins. In what way is she subject to “omnipotent secularist clique that demands total conformity”?

In New Humanist this month, Richard Norman writes an important corrective to the recent outpourings of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. I endorse it. But one thing I am in constant awe of is the ability of religious commentators to whip themselves into a frenzy that they are being persecuted. In the Guardian last year, at least one religious commentator compared Dawkins’ views to that of the actions of a suicide bomber, without a hint of irony. As Christmas is approaching, we can but wonder if the fever pitch will exceed last year’s nonsense about secularists plotting to ban Christmas, a throng which was joined by none other than the Archbishop of York (a diocese which knows more than a thing or two about blood libel and thus you would hope would go to rather more pains not to spout unfounded nonsense). I’m not optimistic.

Going back to Odone’s rehearsed charges, Shabina Begum wasn’t banned from wearing a veil, but an ankle-length jilbab; if she’d settled for a headscarf and long trousers she’d have been fine. Nadia Eweida wasn’t banned from wearing a cross by BA, but from wearing one on top of her uniform in a contrived way. The Portree Primay School scandal was resolved two weeks ago.

But these are all froth. Meanwhile a woman is imprisoned in the Sudan, with demands for a death sentance to be put on her head, for giving a teddy bear the wrong name. And we’re supposed to believe it is secularists that are having it all their own way?

So yes, I do happen to think that Dawkins and Hitchens rather over-egg their respective puddings, but compared with the people they are arguing with they are paragons of restraint.

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According to the BBC, Jack Straw today is to announce plans “allowing MPs to scrutinise public appointments and choose bishops.”

Sounds good to me. I think it should be Lib Dem policy to make Richard Dawkins the next Archbishop of Canterbury.

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The Labour Humanists have been quite high profile at this conference and have been actively promoting their fringe meeting with A.C. Grayling on Monday. A year old, the group is mainly campaigning against faith schools. My erstwhile Doughty Street sparring partner Kris Brown is their Vice Chair and has been running around all week.

This is part of a growing trend. The Humanist and Secularist Liberal Democrats also only formed in the last few years. I have to confess to not joining this group when it was first set up. I remain wary of humanism in its more happy-clappy guise and the full page advert of the BHA in New Humanist this month, emphasising the need to “belong,” doesn’t exactly help (while recognising my own hypocrisy in that it is a sense of belonging that is one of the main attractions of party politics for me). But Richard Dawkins’ rallying cry, following the increasingly vocal anti-secularism of organised religions in the UK, has forced me to consider getting off the fence. It would appear that this is a cross-party phenomenon.

The BHA have also been high profile this past fortnight. I don’t remember them having a stand at the Lib Dem conference exhibition in the past and they are at Labour as well this week. Clearly they too are sensing the need to be more vocal and visible at the moment.

Where this will all lead is unclear. The anti-Dawkins’ backlash is already midflow, while a veritable anti-God publishing industry has taken the book world by storm. What is clear is that there is a lot of latent frustration out there. The emergence of these political groups is definitely a positive development but we need to be clear about our aims and I suspect will need to work together on a cross-party basis to be effective.

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I saw Richard Dawkin’s two-part documentary The Enemies of Reason a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been meaning to add a note of criticism here.

It’s not that I disagree with his assessment that people such as spirit mediums and alternative health gurus are not antithetical to enlightenment values; far from it. My problem is that the programme lacked analysis about why such movements have grown in popularity over the past forty years.

Take homeopathy for instance, and the fact that the NHS now ploughs millions of taxpayers pounds into clinics such as the Royal London Homoeopathic Hospital. How has such a thing come to pass? Have health managers lost their minds? While no doubt there are true believers working inside the NHS who are pushing for homeopathy, I suspect the underlying reason is more prosaic. Indeed, Dawkins himself alluded to this, as Susan Blackmore points out, by alluding to the Placebo effect and comparing the amount of time a homeopath spends with their patient - 1 hours - to the amount of time a GP spends with their patients - 8 minutes.

We could, arguably, achieve the same effects as homeopathy by allowing GPs to prescribe a wider range of treatments. A week in a health spa, for instance. Healthcare professionals know however that such leftfield treatments would be politically untenable. Mental health treatment is very much a Cinderella service, despite the fact that it is now well recognised that depression and a whole range of long term health problems are inextricably linked. So is it any wonder therefore that they turn to an approach with is supported by people such as the Prince of Wales and has at least a quasi-scientific basis to it? Who can blame them for indulging in a noble lie, if the result is more people treated successfully?

Who, then is responsible for creating this climate whereby mental health treatment is marginalised while homeopathy is lauded? We can’t really blame the Prince of Wales. The real problem is that the latter is championed by a whole section of the media. The same media champions horoscopes, the Bible Code and all sorts of anti-intellectual faffery. By coincidence, it also advances an agenda that women are better off staying at home being dutiful housewives, that Princess Diana was murdered, that the poor get what they deserve, that padeophiles are lurking on every street corner, that asylum seekers live like sultans at taxpayer expense while local people struggle to find housing and that the house price boom is an unequivocal good.

What I’m getting at, of course, is that the missing third part of Dawkins’ the Enemies of Reason is an expose of Paul Dacre, his poisonous empire and his competitors at the Express. It seems odd to expose well meaning dowsers as frauds while failing to lambast the people at the top of the chain. Of course, were Dawkins to indulge in such a project he would find himself having a torrent of shit poured onto him by the very people he chose to attack. That may be what is holding him back. But if he doesn’t, who will? It would at the very least be entertaining to watch the likes of Melanie Phillips and Peter Hitchens go bright purple.

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Stephen “Barefoot Doctor” Russell has done a piece for the Guardian today, dissing Richard Dawkins’ C4 documentary The Enemies of Reason.

It’s pretty thin fare. Basically, Dawkins is “so last century” and if alternative medicine can be put down the the Placebo effect, so what? It works, doesn’t it?

If this is the best the alternative medicine community can come up with, good luck to them. Of course, it turns out that Barefoot has a particular unique take on “Placebo effect“:

The ‘Barefoot Doctor’ - known to millions from his TV career, his range of products stocked by high-street chemists and a form of healing based on Tao philosophy - has been forced to issue an extraordinary statement admitting to having sex with ex-patients in the past.

But it’s okay, ‘cos he’s a celebrity, apparently. So long as you have sex with ex-patients “like a pop star” and not like a doctor, where’s the beef?

Where on Earth did Dawkins get the idea that these people somehow prey on vulnerable people?

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For a man who is clearly extremely intelligent, Richard Dawkins can be a fucking idiot at times.

The worst thing about all this is, it has the appearance that the only reason Dawkins is saying this is because he is suffering from an irrational sense of rivalry stemming from this literary prize.

At least his wife probably supports him. I’m sure Romana would feel the same way as her former companion about the Abzorbaloff.

UPDATE: Richard Dawkins has issued a mea culpa in the Guardian, albeit making it clear that he was set up. It’s fair enough, but I still think it is an over-reaction to what is a fairly innocuous sentiment, regardless of who actually said it.

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I meant to blog about this article yesterday but hey, don’t you know there’s a war on?

As a summary of the various arguments currently raging between what is often oversimplified as faith groups and secularists, it isn’t too bad. But unfortunately, it is also guilty of a moral relativism and lazy journalistic notions about ‘two sides to every story’.

To be fair, it does recover slightly from a disastrous second paragraph, but this does rather brilliantly sum up the problem with the whole:

“We are witnessing a social phenomenon that is about fundamentalism,” says Colin Slee, the Dean of Southwark. “Atheists like the Richard Dawkins of this world are just as fundamentalist as the people setting off bombs on the tube, the hardline settlers on the West Bank and the anti-gay bigots of the Church of England. Most of them would regard each other as destined to fry in hell.

Excuse me? Richard Dawkins is equivalent to nutjob suicide bombers? Let’s think about this for a second. A senior member of the Church of England is suggesting that Dawkins is every bit as contemptible as someone who murders dozens of people in cold blood, purely because he got a book published. I got my head bitten off last week for suggesting that nationalism and xenophobia make uncomfortable bedfellows, yet this man is allowed to make such an astonishing claim in a national newspaper with the journalist not only not questioning it, but making it the theme of his whole article.

(I should also point out the theological nonsensity that is calling a secularist a fundamentalist. You simply cannot accuse someone of fundamentalism for believing that there are no fundamentals. How a man got to be so senior in the CofE without knowing that is beyond me).

I’m afraid this sort of nonsense pervades the whole article. There is no denying that both ’sides’ of the debate have their own extremists, but let’s have a bit of perspective here. An extremist person of faith goes around strapping bombs on him/herself (or preferably strapping them on helpful morons) and exterminating as many people as possible. Secularists, at their most extreme, think that burkas shouldn’t be worn in public. You simply cannot get away with the claim that they’re both as bad as each other.

As I’ve said before, I haven’t yet read Dawkins’ latest, although I have read virtually every sentence he wrote between 1975 and 1997. My own view is that he has a weakness for straw men, attacking creationists and other loons while failing to engage moderate religion in meaningful debate. But the man isn’t evil in the same way that any rational human being would regard any religious extremist.

Perhaps someone who has read his latest book can enlighten me: has he actually called for what Rowan Williams defines in the article as ‘private secularism’, where everyone is compelled to “silence their fundamental convictions and debate in a value-free atmosphere of public neutrality”? My reading of his earlier work suggests that while he may hate religion, he defends freedom of expression. Yet Yahya Birt of The Islamic Foundation insists that he does. If so, the man’s a fool.

But I have a suspicion that Rowan Williams’ distinction between private and “procedural” secularism, where “different groups could at least converse with each other in public discussions over sensitive questions of value and policy,” is a canard. No one rational surely disagrees with that definition of secularism. Equally, no-one rational could argue that as a result of such secularism, religious organisations seeking to provide a public service (often at the expense of the taxpayer) should be free to ignore anti-discrimination legislation, or should be allowed to run their own (again, taxpayer funded) faith schools. This isn’t secularism Rowan: this is exceptionalism. Yet again, Stuart Jeffries does not question the notions being put to him.

If I was in any doubt that there is a cynical - some would say ungodly - agenda by faith groups to shift public opinion against secularism, this article has scotched such notions. Throughout this article there is evidence of religious people using moderate language to justify extremist notions, while caricaturing “the enemy” (which is ostensibly “extremists” like Dawkins but in fact looks rather like secularism in general). As an exercise in muddying the waters, I have to give it to them: they’ve done a terrific job.

Sounds like the makings of a wedge strategy to me. Let’s take another example, that of the delightful, not at all stupid-of-face, Nadia Eweida. Much has been made of British Airways’ attempts to discipline her for insisting on wearing a cross over her uniform. What seems to constantly get forgotten in this debate is that her uniform involves wearing a cravat: in other words she was balancing her cross OVER a fucking necktie.

Seriously for a second, why shouldn’t a company that has a uniform policy, discipline a member of staff for such daft behaviour? She was clearly going out of her way to start a row. If she was a wiccan, do you think various faith groups would line up behind her right to wear a pentacle in such a way? What about a Yoda badge? More to the point, if a man had fought for the right to wear a crucifix over his tie (or worn a tie with a cross rather than his uniform issue one), would it have got the same interest?

I can’t help but suspect that the whole row was stage managed from the start. She and her lawyers must have known that her claim wouldn’t stand up in court, but her platform wasn’t really an industrial tribunal, but the media which could be relied upon to distort the real issue. The main faith groups helpfully laid in on her behalf.

Ditto the recent case over Exeter University ‘banning’ a Christian Union. Ditto the manufactured row earlier this year about gay adoption. Ditto the ridiculous stories in December about evil people trying to ban Christmas. These are all stage managed rows that make good Daily Mail headlines, but which only stand up if the public is deprived of the full facts.

The faith groups which are conspiring in this media onslaught don’t want an open debate: they want a punch up. Some individuals even go as far as suggesting this in Stuart Jeffries’ article:

Azzim Tamimi, director of the Institute of Islamic Political Thought:

The problem is that these people [secularists] believe that they have the absolute truth. That means you have no room to talk to others so you end up having a physical fight. They want to close the door and ignore religion, but this will provoke a violent religiosity. If someone seeks to deny my existence, I will fight to assert it.

Richard Chartres, Bishop of London:

If you exile religious communities to the margins, then they will start to speak the words of fire among consenting adults, and the threat to public order and the public arena, I think, will grow and grow.

Whatever happened to turning the other cheek? These people, from mainstream faith groups, are actually suggesting that if you stand up to them, you are responsible for provoking a violent reaction?

You would have thought that the religious prohibition on violence would be stronger than a couple of harsh words written by Richard Dawkins in a book that very few people of faith will actually read, but clearly this is not the case. And again, I would remind you that these are not the words of loony nutjobs like Abu Qatada, but the mainstream. The fact that these men can come so close to inciting religiously inspired violence and yet keep their jobs tells you all you need to know.

I’m not anti-religion. I’d be much more comfortable breaking bread with a (genuine) religious secularist than a Humanist who thinks H is a quasi-religious icon. But we need to be alert to the fact that softly spoken beardy weirdies are softly, softly doing the very thing that the more harshly spoken beardy weirdies currently hiding out in Pakistani caves would do by force.

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