Belgian bid to ban book is bad… uh… bdecision

My alliteration has seen better days, it seems.

It’s tough sometimes to see how the disparate interests on this blog (religion, free speech, race and critical thinking) fit together into an overall picture. Religion and free speech are often at odds, so that’s an easy fit I suppose. Religion stands opposed to critical thinking, so again it’s not a major stretch to tie those two individual elements together. But where does race fit in? I often find myself scratching my head asking myself the same question: are my discussions on race simply an outlier to an otherwise pro-secularist blog? Does my ‘skeptic hat’ clash with my ‘black man waistcoat’?

Thankfully, sometimes I see things in the news that help tie the whole ball of wax together:

A Congolese man is trying to get a controversial Tintin book banned in the cartoon star’s home country of Belgium. A court is to rule on whether the book can be sold in Belgium and, if so, whether it should carry a warning.

The Tintin book in question concerns an incredibly-offensive depiction of African people as stupid and primitive, as the (white) main character does them a good turn by teaching them important things about the world. Of course, it’s the world from the point of view of the European colonizers, which brings up a whole host of auxiliary issues. This man, Bienvenu Mbutu, is seeking to have the book banned on grounds that it portrays an appallingly racist view of black Africans.

I was initially torn over this issue. As a victim of the negative portrayal of black people in popular media, I applaud any decision to ameliorate the damage done by such propaganda. However, while I am a black man, I am first and foremost a Canadian. One of the things that comes with the territory of living in an Enlightened democracy like Canada is defense of the right of free speech. Banning books is the infringement of free speech, which is wrong. It didn’t sit right with me, and the cognitive dissonance bothered me.

After giving it some serious thought, I arrived at a realization. Far from being a negative portrayal of black Africans (although it is that, too), this book is a shocking revelation about the history of white Europeans (I guess, in this case, Belgians). This is a real piece of history that shows how intellectually and morally bankrupt the paternalistic society of European colonial powers was. These types of images, which rightly shock and appall us today, were seen as either harmless entertainment (for children, no less) or as accurate depictions of reality. The colonial powers thought nothing of taking land from people who they saw as little more than human-like animals. The aftershocks of this perverse racist attitude are still felt today in Africa, parts of Asia, the Caribbean and South America (to say nothing of the United States and Canada).

Banning this book would only serve to attempt to mask history. These types of publication are emblematic of a time in our world where everyone believed the lie of white supremacy. Now that we are trying to extricate ourselves (and by ‘we’ I mean everyone, white people included) from the deep entrenchment of this false ideology, we need to examine our own past to see how it affects our present. Sweeping the nasty parts of our history under the rug of contrived ignorance will only serve to prolong the issues of race and racism. Furthermore, we will lose the opportunity to use artifacts from our (recent) history to learn from our mistakes.

I think the book should be allowed to be sold, but with an introduction that highlights the context in which the book was written. Talk about the predominant attitudes of the day, admit that work still needs to be done, but while you’re at it, make mention of the amount of progress that has been made in a relatively short time. It’s only by acknowledging our past and incorporating it into our present that we can reach the long-sought future of racial integration.

Why science is better than religion

There is a very stupid argument out there in the world of arguments. It goes something like this:

You have to believe in science, just like you have to believe in religion. Therefore, science is just another kind of religion.

On the surface, that appears to be a logical premise. It even managed to find its way into an episode of one of my favourite shows. However, that’s due to an unfortunate accident in the English language whereby “believe” has two meanings. I’m not going to go through the entire argument here, except to give a specific example. The statement “I believe in myself” means that you have confidence that you will be able to perform a task based on self-knowledge. It does not (or at least not usually) mean “I have faith that I exist as an entity” although Descartes would probably have a few things to say about that. At any rate, the word “believe” when it comes to reliance on facts and observation is quite distinct from “believe” when it comes to large, unfathomable concepts. I’ll let PZ Myers and xkcd talk about that for now, and perhaps come back to it later.

However, it doesn’t matter. Let’s, for the sake of argument, allow this line of reasoning. Let’s suspend logic in this particular case and grant that you have to believe in science in the same way you have to believe in religion (or God, or faeries, or gremlins, or whatever you believe in). Even if we make this concession, science is still far better than religion for one very important reason:

Science allows you to make predictions.

Religious belief of any kind (in Yahweh, or Zeus, or Allah who is really  just Yahweh in disguise) has its origins in looking at the world and attempting to explain what has happened. Our ancestors looked at a seemingly unimaginably complicated world and made some post-hoc rationalizations to explain things. This is entirely reasonable and there is apparently some evidence to suggest it’s hard-wired into our genes for us to perform this process. Science undeniably performs the same task – evolution is a prime example of using present-day observations to predict (post-dict?) what has happened in the past to explain the world we are in today.

However, religion stops there. Any claim that religion can make about what Yahweh/Allah/Buddha (YahwAlladdha) will or will not do is wrong as often as it is right (I’m being generous here). People who are prayed for, for example, do not consistently recover from terminal illness. Virtuous, God-fearing people still get murdered, have their houses blown over by winds, go financially bankrupt, the list goes on. Following the precepts of religion does not give you any protection against the events in life over which you cannot exert control. This phenomenon (also known in some theological circles as the Problem of Evil) is commonly explained by evoking the “Master Plan”:

God has a plan for us all. We cannot know the mind of God, as He is so far above us.

I call shenanigans. What this argument is essentially saying is that it is impossible to know with any certainty what YahwAlladdha will do. I’m going to repeat that for the sake of clarity: the Master Plan argument is a statement that nobody can know with any certainty what YahwAlladdha will do in the future. Since the Master Plan appears to all eyes to be effectively the same as random chance, in which sometimes good things happen to good people and other times they don’t, it’s not too much of a stretch to say that belief in YahwAlladdha is not useful when it comes to trying to predict the future.

If you’ve been keeping score, science and religion are tied in terms of being able to explain the past (although science is much better, we’ll round up). However, religion draws up a big goose egg when it comes to reliably predicting what will happen in the future.

So how about science? Does science do any better when it comes to making predictions? You bet your ass. The examples are legion: the moon landing, medicine, the very technology that allows you to read and me to write this stunningly brilliant post, again the list goes on. I’m going to pick one that is intuitively easy to grasp for the sake of specific illustration: the origin of lightning. There are two competing hypotheses in this example. The first is that lightning is caused by the discharge of electric potential energy borne by particles interacting in large weather systems. The second is that lightning is forged by the god Haephestus and hurled to Earth by a wrathful Zeus.  Ignoring for a moment the absurdity of the second hypothesis, let’s treat them both as equally plausible from the standpoint of a person who is naive to the evidence.

I need to back-track here for a moment to make a very important statement. That is, that science is a process. Science is not merely the facts and theories that have been generated by scientists; it is the method by which those facts and theories were developed. In that, science is a tool used to generate reliable knowledge and understanding about the world. The process involves proposing an explanation for a phenomenon and then testing that explanation while simultaneously ruling out other potential explanations. Science is the application of observation and reason to find suitable explanations for everyday events. Phrases like “scientific truth” or “science says X” are attempts to equate the process and the outcome. To someone who understands science, these statements are innocuous reference to the method behind the findings. However, to those who do not understand science, the statements are blind appeals to the authority of experts. The important thing to remember is that science is the process by which we test our understanding of the world, and allows us to distinguish and eliminate erroneous explanations.

So how does this apply to our example of lightning? Our naive individual has to decide between two competing explanations. She sees that lightning does indeed fall from the sky, which neither confirms nor denies either hypothesis (since everyone knows Zeus lives in the clouds). She observes that lightning is most often accompanied by rain and wind, two phenomena which are not explicitly within the domain of Zeus, but he could still be teased in as an explanation. She further observes that sparks, potentially a miniature form of lightning, can be generated through static electricity independently of the wrath of anything. She sees that lightning tends to strike most often at certain times of the year, independent of the actions of the people (who may or may not have done anything to provoke any wrath). She also sees that even the virtuous followers of Zeus are occasionally struck by lightning, with approximately the same frequency as the iniquitous. By this time, the Zeus hypothesis has been quite exploded. As our observer goes on to learn more about electricity, weather patterns, conductivity and other properties of matter, she will gradually come to accept the weather hypothesis as evidence-based fact.

The advantage to using this process – rather than slavishly adhering to a belief in Zeus – is that our observer can learn to predict when lightning will strike. She can also use her theory to anticipate methods of reducing the impact of lightning by building structures that ground electricity safely. If she had instead asserted that “the will of Zeus cannot be predicted“, then no such anticipatory steps could be taken. Our observer would go on worshiping Zeus until the day she is killed by a random lightning strike. It is interesting to note here that the validity of the weather hypothesis doesn’t necessarily completely rule out the Zeus hypothesis. One could argue that Zeus behaves exactly like random chance because of his ineffable will. However, if the unfathomable will of God Zeus looks exactly like random chance that can be explained and predicted through the scientific method, there is no value in adding Zeus to the equation. The point is that religious explanation that opposes scientific findings is wrong as often as it is right, and religious explanation that is in line with the science is essentially indistinguishable from science and does not contribute anything meaningful to the discussion.

I have chosen perhaps an absurd example – nobody has believed in Zeus in thousands of years. However, it should be noted that the identical line of “reasoning” is used in contemporary attempts to explain the natural world through God (specifically Yahweh). They are flimsy arguments that require you to believe (in a religious sense) in order to work. As I said previously: if you have to believe in it for it to work, it’s nothing but a placebo. True statements don’t require you to believe, they just require you to look at the data.

In order to forestall the argument that science can say nothing about moral matters whereas religion can, I will make a brief comment here (first, you should look at my previous post on this subject). Religion provides many assertions (in the form of prescripts or commandments) of what is “good.” Religious text is consistently short on justification for these assertions; the only support these texts can offer is that “God says it is so.” We are then all enjoined to believe not only in the existence of God (for which no evidence is offered) but the inerrant infallibility of the texts from which His edicts supposedly come (again, with no evidence to support this claim). Logical contemplation and observation, however, provides us with a great many moral assertions that are supported by more than hand-waving and invocations of an invisible Almighty. Many texts – from Socrates and Aristotle down through Kant, Hobbes, Mill, and Bentham up to Sartre, Pirsig, even Ayn Rand – provide us with discussions on what is moral and immoral that do not come from “God says it is so”, but descended from deontological first principles and founded in reason and observation. Religious belief fails to provide us with consistent and clear moral guidelines except insofar as it says that certain things are bad because God says they are. In this way, it fails even this exemption on moral grounds.

Even if we grant religious belief the same status as belief in the scientific method (and they are by no means the same type of belief), religious belief still fails to measure up to scientific beliefs. While both can be used to explain things that happened in the past, only the beliefs arrived by way of the scientific method can consistently provide us with the means to predict what will happen in the future. Religious invocation of a Master Plan is indistinguishable from random chance, and retards progress and understanding. Science can do as good or, more commonly, far more accurate a job at predicting events in the future and it does not need to invoke any unprovable religious concepts to do so. Science is distinct from religion and is in fact far better.

Movie Friday: Eddie Izzard – Whales ‘n’ God

Today’s movie features one of my all-time favourite comedians: Eddie Izzard. Sometimes remembered as the “Lost Python” from Monty Python, you might recognize him from Ocean’s 13. At any rate, he’s a wildly funny comedian who often riffs on religion as part of his routines. It’s hard to pick just one bit to exhibit, so I picked one at random.

There’s no lesson on this one, he’s just really funny.

I pick on the Jews

Looking back over my previous posts, I get the impression that I come across as an Islamophobe. Many of my stories have targeted Muslim religious idiocy and talked about how intellectually bankrupt that particular religion is. This is regrettable, as my intention in this blog is to highlight the intellectual bankruptcy of all religious traditions.

So today I’m picking on the Jews.

Israeli settlers in the West Bank are suspected to have vandalised a mosque by spraying slogans on its walls, Palestinian officials say.

Oh goody! Vandalism of sites of religious worship! Gee, where have we seen that before? It’s almost as though by vandalizing the sites of worship of your political opponents, you are no better than the neo-Nazis that are committing these hate crimes against you! And where are the objections from Jewish religious leaders against the acts of mosque vandalism? Conspicuously absent. To their credit, the IDF did not shrug it off and actually did make an arrest but without sufficient evidence no charges could be laid.

My point isn’t that Jewish people are bad, or that Muslim people are bad, or that Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, etc. etc. etc. people are bad. People are people (I’ll pause a moment to let the soaring heights of my rhetoric wash over you). When you allow people the space to think and reason, and give them the tools to do so effectively, people are capable of great things. However, when you poison their rational mind with religious nonsense and take away their capacity to work through issues logically, they can lose that capacity. Furthermore, when you whip them into a furor, based on that faulty reasoning and arbitrary belief structure, they are capable of committing acts of profound evil. Even the great atheist mass-murderers of our time (Pol Pott, Stalin) used the same tactics of suppression of logical thought and rational ability to spur their troops on to commit slaughter.

Encouraging an individual’s mind through logic and reason leads to an improved life for humankind and a hope for our continued existence on this planet. Perverting the mind through nonsense and stupidity can only have negative consequences. No cultural group is immune from this, as all religious teachings are equally flawed.

And while I’m at it, let’s pick on the Sikhs too.

The RCMP and Vancouver police are investigating threats against Liberal MP Ujjal Dosanjh posted on a Facebook page labelled “Ujjal Dosanjh is a Sikh Traitor.” The most menacing posting urges, “someone shoot him — ASAP.”

Regular readers will remember that I have picked on the Sikhs before. Ujjal Dosanjh, recently made internationally famous on the Colbert Report, is an MP for Vancouver, BC. Of course Vancouver is one of the most multi-ethnic cities in the country, so one would imagine that people might be a bit more tolerant of opposing viewpoints on any number of issues. Then again, as Christopher Hitchens says: “religion poisons everything.” A recent parade held by the Sikh community was the centre of a great deal of controversy, as parade organizers refused to take down displays depicting Sikh terrorists as martyrs for a greater cause. Veiled threats were leveled at Dosanjh and Dave Hayer (an MLA) for speaking out against the glorification of murderers.

So how does the religious community, motivated as they are by a desire for peace on earth and goodwill towards men, react? Of course – they threaten to kill him.

The [Facebook] page administrator Avtar Kanda claims that Dosanjh “used his Sikh roots to get elected in Vancouver, but then betrayed his own people.” “This piece of s— is a scumbag traitor and an insult to the Sikh religion,” Kanda said.

Another poster calling himself Sukhi Loco Singh said: “Do not spare anyone who insults guru ji-shaheed sent jarnail Singh ji Khalsa bhindranwale.”

This is not a political or cultural disagreement. This is not about the free expression of religion, or an argument in defense of the practice of Sikhism. This is a religious furor being perpetrated by Canadian-born kids who are importing conflicts from another hemisphere.

The point of this post is that no matter what the group – Jews, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Hindus, Mormons, Scientologists – religious belief corrupts the mind and infiltrates the world around us. If religious practice was a personal matter that took place in the privacy of the home or in a cloistered environment like a church service, there would be no problem. However, by its very nature religion commands its followers to submit the world to its will. Not all of the followers listen, but that’s due more to their own forbearance and wisdom than it is the nature of the religious belief. All religion asks its followers to stop thinking and follow blindly, and whenever someone speaks against the beliefs, it tells the followers to get angry and take personal offense. After all, they are insulting your god.

This is a picture of an otter:

So cuuuuuute!

So cuuuute! KILL THE INFIDELS!

Indonesia lobs one over the plate

I write a blog that highlights, among other things, the pervasive way in which religion detrimentally affects the lives of people all over the world. I also put a fair amount of effort into highlighting issues of free speech, which is something I feel quite strongly about.

Indonesia isn’t even trying to make my job difficult.

On Monday, Indonesia’s constitutional court decided in favour of its controversial 1967 blasphemy law, thwarting hopes it would be reviewed to allow new religions and sects.

Hooray for the modern world! While thousands of people work tirelessly every day to cure disease, discover more about the world and push the frontiers of human endeavour, Indonesia’s religion-controlled government (can you say “theocracy”? I knew you could!) is cracking down on people whose beliefs are a different kind of stupidity than the officially-licensed stupid. This bootleg stupid can’t be allowed to spread, or people might start realizing that if several contradictory views of the supernatural exist, they might all be wrong.

“The majority of Indonesia’s 235 million strong population are moderate Sunni Muslims, with a reputation for tolerance.”

This quote baffles me. A Muslim majority country, with a Sunni majority therein, who are purportedly tolerant (I have no idea what that means in the context of religion, particularly in a theocratic country), upholds a law banning non-sanctioned religious expression. Perhaps someone at the BBC mis-spelled “ignorance”.

While I am (clearly) not a fan of religion, I am even less a fan of state-sponsored religion. More than that, I am even less a fan of telling people they are not allowed to speak their beliefs, no matter what they might happen to be. While I make fun of places like Indonesia, Ireland, Lybia and Somalia I do so out of a deep sadness. No progress has ever been made, either by individuals or by societies, by jailing dissidents for speaking up against corrupt power. We will never be able to free people from the crushing yoke of poverty until we can throw off the oppressive influence of small-minded religious bigots. Religion has no place in either our laws or the marketplace of ideas.

Free Speech, Religion, and Liberalism

CLS over at Classically Liberal has written an incredibly well-thought-out and eloquent essay on the importance of free speech and the separation of church and state.

The forefathers of modern libertarianism, the classical liberals, first campaigned for freedom of conscience. They wanted to limit the power of the state because the state was the instrument by which intolerant church policies were imposed on the public. The church, preferring to not have blood on its hands directly, left the killing to the state. So the state imposed theological order at the point of the gun—or more accurately at the time, at the point of the sword. Transgressors would be identified and executed, often at the stake. But what the state was doing was entirely at the behest of the church. The church is pretty much a toothless dog when it doesn’t have access to state power. It can bark but it can’t bite.

It brings me great comfort to find smart people who agree with me. Considering the nonsense going on in the United States right now, it’s nice to know there are at least some rational minds still at work.

IRONY!

One of my common complaints about the forces of stupid is that they seem to have no sense of irony. When, for example, Christians reference the bible to persecute gay people as unrepentant sinners, whilst simultaneously forgetting the parable about the adulteress who was saved from stoning by the admonition “let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” It’s especially funny when those same anti-gay crusaders turn up in a bath house or in a men’s room somewhere having all kinds of kinky gay sex. The complete lack of a sense of irony or self-critical skills that is required to make such leaps of hypocrisy is one of the hallmarks of the footsoldiers of “DUH”.

So it came as no surprise when I read this news story:

A radical Muslim group has warned the creators of South Park that they could face violent retribution for depicting the Prophet Muhammad in a bear suit during the 200th episode of the animated TV show.

I love South Park, I think it’s one of the smartest shows on TV. While I don’t always agree with their views, I do enjoy good satire, and South Park dresses that satire up in good wholesome filth, tearing down the notion that anything is sacred. In the episode(s) in question, the characters were extorted into exposing Muhammad so that celebrities could capture his powers of “never being mocked”. Of course, in true South Park style, things just get more and more ridiculous.

The entire point of the episode arc was how ridiculous it was to respect the beliefs of complete nutjobs who make ridiculous terrorist demands. In the episode, the characters have to resort to a series of increasingly-ridiculous stunts to avoid accidentally showing any part of Muhammad: locking him in a U-haul trailer, not letting him walk around, and then finally dressing him up in a bear costume.

South Park shows Muhammad as a bear

All this to avoid reprisal from a group of people who lack the basic level of self-awareness to avoid becoming willing participants in their own public lampooning. In the next episode (it was a 2-parter) the image are covered with large black bars that say “CENSORED”. This is of course to say nothing of the fact that Muhammad has appeared, unmasked, on the show before:

Muhammad on South Park

Of course, just as the show’s creators intended, radial Muslims became incensed by the (non-)portrayal of their religious symbol. This ridiculous reaction to a cartoon bear which may or not contain a cartoon of a person who may or may not resemble Muhammad (nobody knows what he actually looked like) played right into the purpose of the show. It’s one of those “art imitates life imitates art” things where a television show caused the world to behave in the way the show predicted, which allowed the show to turn around and lampoon that reaction.

There’s also an argument to be made that, by outlawing the portrayal of Muhammad, Muslims are making it more likely that people will do just that for shock value. Talk about suicide bombing yourself in the foot!

Canada: the great race experiment

I’ve said previously that Canada is a unique place. However, in that post I only touched on that idea to make specific reference to a news item I found interesting. I want to expand on that statement a bit.

While some people whose opinions I deeply respect disagree with my assessment on this matter, I see Canada as a place that lacks a strong national identity (at least at home). Americans have an identity that is built on principles of liberty in opposition to tyranny, and a history of being the leaders of the world. The English have an ex-empire, but also a history of monarchy and feudal identity that stretches back to the time of the Anglos and Saxons (as do many other European countries). China has a national identity built around its ancient history and, more recently, that has turned into a more totalitarian China-versus-the-world cultural ethos. Australians are rugged and fun-loving, Jamaicans are strong-willed and have reggae and Rastafari as part of their make-up, South Africans (for better or worse) have their history of racial divisiveness and the challenge of building a society from that. All this is to say absolutely nothing about the countries all over the world whose identities are closely allied with their religion (Iran, Israel, Indonesia… and that’s just the Is).

So where does that leave Canada? Our history doesn’t stand in opposition to tyranny; we didn’t fight off colonial British rule, we asked politely. We don’t see ourselves as the living incarnations of our ancient aboriginal ancestors like the British; we in fact don’t seem to like our aboriginal past very much at all. Our government/communitarian identification is namby-pamby compared to that of China; in fact, a big part of the country is trying to split off. We don’t have the outback, we haven’t invented a musical genre, we don’t have a history of racial subjugation, and have no national religion.

Watching the Olympic closing games, there was a brief moment where Canada seemed to exhibit a scintilla of national identity, which went only so far as to draw attention to the fact that the people of the world don’t really know what Canada is really all about, except that we’re funny and self-effacing, and we have beavers, mounties, and maple leaves. Is that our fate? Are we forever the middle child of the world – still part of the family but not as able as Big Brother or as attention-getting as Little Sister?

I don’t think that’s the case. I think there’s something about Canada that is uniquely Canadian that we missed a huge opportunity to exploit. Canada is, like no other place on the planet, a country where all people are welcome. I realize there are a great many countries with immigration policies, some even more liberal than ours, but the very fact that Canada does not have an over-arching Canadian-ness sets it apart from other places. Immigrants to the USA, for example, are exhorted to become “American”. Much of American immigration is inseparable from the phrase “melting pot” which means that one you’re in the States, forces act on you that compel you to become like everyone else. I would argue that any country with a strong national identity will have the same effect. Those countries with a large, politically-dominant native racial group will do this even more so.

But for the same reasons that I outlined above, this is largely impossible in Canada. Oh sure, there’s the occasional right-winger who says that all the towel-heads need to go back to Iraquistan and get out of the white man’s country, but (thankfully) those voices are rare. As you travel west to east across the country, you are beset by Brits, Germans, Chinese, Indians (both dot and feather), Spanish, Ukranians, Russians, Polish, Métis, Scots, Irish, Ethiopians, Somalians, Nigerians, Greeks, Portugese, more Chinese, more Indians, Caribbeans, Cubans, Pakistanis, Persians, Italians, French (both tri-colour and fleur-de-lis), Dutch… the list goes on and on. Many of these groups (and to my knowledge, all of the ones I have described above) have built large communities within the overall mosaic of Canada.

So who are the real Canadians? The question of longevity is a moot one. In the prairies, for example, there are large Ukranian and Polish communities that have been there for generations. Oakville and Halifax have supported large communities of former African slaves since Abolition in the mid-19th century (before, in fact, Canada was its own country). Chinese communities built the railroads in the western parts of the province. The French have been here as long as the British. Even the “Native First Nations” people immigrated from another continent, if archaeology and evolution are to be believed. No one cultural or racial group can call themselves “the real Canadian people”.

The question must be asked again: who are the real Canadians. If the answer is “no one”, then the answer is also, conversely, “everyone”. Everyone who lives here and loves this country is a Canadian. As a matter of legality, I’ll acquiesce to the federal government and say that you have either have been born here or formally been granted citizenship to become a “real Canadian”, but that’s all it takes. All of these “real Canadians” then have a hand in building our national identity. This is what makes Canada uniquely Canadian.

Certainly this reality comes with a whole host of challenges, but we have to take the bad with the good. One of the fascinating things that a place like Canada allows is the free inter-mixing of cultural groups that, up until now, had never interacted in all of human history. If you look at a place like Nepal or Burma, which are sandwiched between India and China, you will observe a culture that shares many of the characteristics of both. That’s what happens when two cultures are allowed to mix – a new culture emerges that is a “child” of both “parents”. However, places like Kenya and Spain have never had an opportunity to share cultural characteristics, as they are separated by geographical distance.

What happens though, when a strapping lad with Kenyan parents meets a pretty young thing from Spain on the streets of Vancouver (and please believe I’ve seen it)? Or when a hot Russian babe links up with a finance-savvy Jamaican (again, seeeeen iiit!)? Or a Polish Jew falls for a Kuwaiti hipster Christian (haven’t seen it yet, but only because I haven’t introduced Alanna to Stuart – everyone falls for that guy; he’s so dreamy). All of these combi-nations (see what I did there?) and more are possible only in a place like Canada. People keep their own cultural identity, but are thrown in the mix with people from backgrounds their parents (all the way back to their ancestors) would never have had access to.

What kind of culture will come out of a place like this? Just like the Nepalese, a culture will grow that shares characteristics of all the separate cultures that influence it. A race of people will arise that, like no other in history, cannot point to a place on the globe and say “my people come from there”. Their people will come from everywhere. And it can only happen here.

Among other things that are easily-identified as Canadian: hockey, maple syrup, public health care, Tim Horton’s; I am proud that Canada is a place that can be, unlike any other, home to the whole world.

Movie Friday: Sam Harris at TED

A common defense of religious belief and practice is that without religion (and the teachings of the holy books), there would be no morality. In a historical, practical sense this is at least partially true. Morals were dictated and enforced by religious authority, and justified on religious grounds – God says not to steal, therefore we will punish stealing. However, it is important to recognize that just because something has worked in the past, that does not make it true, nor does it mean we must continue to use it when we have much better alternatives. As Brian Lychenhaun noted in his presentation that I talked about on Wednesday, not only is it possible to make moral decisions without relying on religious teachings, we do it already. I would argue (and, I think, so would Brian) that it is in fact better to make moral decisions that are informed by critical thinking and logic rather than relying on a mistranslated text written thousands of years ago that invoke, as their reasoning, an entity whose existence cannot be proven.

Author Sam Harris makes a similar argument that science can inform our moral decisions. He does so at TED, which is a lecture series given by prominent scientists, authors and thinkers. If you haven’t watched TED videos before, you should. I promise not to make every Movie Friday a TED lecture, but they will show up with regularity because they’ve got some really fantastic ideas. Anyway, check out the video:

I am with Sam most of the way. I think he fails to make a solidly coherent point – I’m sure he has one, but he seems to dance around it a bit. The central thesis seems to be that values reduce to facts, and we can examine and test the truth of those facts. Knowledge of those facts will help inform the decisions we make. I’m with him only part of the way. He uses “values” in a more colloquial way than I do. He seems to be talking about decisions and policies whereas I see values as the set of emotional and mental prescripts that underpin those decisions – being anti-abortion is not a “value”, it is a position that is driven by the underlying emotional opinion that human beings come into existence at the moment of conception. Of course, that value can be examined by science, but there needs to first be a definition of what a “human” is. However, the take-away message (or at least the one that I took away) is that we can use science and the scientific method (logic applied to agreed-upon first principles, verified by observation) to answer moral questions. We do not need religion, as religious texts are not comprehensive enough to give reliable answers in the face of novel ethical dilemmas.

I also particularly love the section where he throws away the tired liberal doctrine of “who are we to say that another culture/practice/person is wrong?” He turns it right back on its head and asks “who are we not to say?” We can establish standards for what is right and wrong, based on an agreed-upon first principle of ‘good’. We can test the value of that ‘goodness’ through logic and observation – if adherence to scripture is ‘the good’, what effect will that have? Is that a desirable effect for human survival and social stability? Harris offers “human happiness” as an idea for ‘the good’, which is the basic principle held by secular humanists. Sure it has its flaws but it is far superior (for humans, who are the ones making the decisions) to any religious exhortation to please the invisible YahwAlladdha.

I also love the lines that he goes out on:

“We can no more respect and tolerate vast differences in notions of human well-being than we can respect or tolerate vast differences in the notion of how disease spreads or the safety standards of large buildings or airplanes. We simply must converge on the answers we give to the most important questions in human life; and to do that, we have to admit these questions have answers.”

Just fantastic.

BOOBQUAKE!

Sometimes it’s hard not to laugh:

“Many women who do not dress modestly lead young men astray and spread adultery in society which increases earthquakes,” Hojjat ol-eslam Kazem Sediqi, the acting Friday prayer leader in Tehran explained.

I don’t know too many Iranian women, although I know a handful who are Persian. Don’t get me wrong – they’re all smoking hot, but how sex-crazed are men in Iran that they can’t possibly restrain themselves from humping these ladies so hard that the freaking Earth moves? I’m a big guy, as guy size goes, and I like to go at it like any red-blooded human person. At no point in my career has the fury of my genital onslaught caused tectonic plate movement. Maybe if I eat more vegetables…

This is, of course, what happens when you allow religion to run rampant, whilst simultaneously undercutting public science education and subjugating women. This isn’t some crackpot loony at an out-of-the-way mosque – this guy is a big deal in Tehran. Over in North America, we’d certainly never let that kind of idiocy pass, right? Well, except when Jerry Fallwell blamed 9/11 on tolerance of homosexuality. But that’s just one nutjob, right? One nutjob with a multi-million-person following. But anyway, that was years ago. We’ve come a long way over here! Well, except when Rush Limbaugh blamed the Iceland volcano on the health care bill.

We already know what causes volcanoes to erupt, just like we know what causes earthquakes – these forces have absolutely nothing to do with human morality. They occurred billions of years before there was any life on the planet, let alone one particular species that God apparently hates so much that he kills them with earthquakes when some of them wear tight pants. Earthquakes are caused by tectonic plate shifts along fault lines – such as the one that’s apparently right under Tehran. This of course fits right into Sediqi’s fantasy of a wrathful sex-crazed God (who uncannily resembles the wrathful, sex-crazed Sediqi…) who will, of course, cause the Earth to destroy the city because of some human fault. This is the kind of twisted self-fulfillingly prophetic non-logic that is the hallmark of religious thinking.

Thankfully, there are some people who are willing to fight this scourge, two sweater-mittens at a time. Please feel free to join her crusade, as I am sadly ill-equipped.

EDIT: Rose has suggested to me a reason why you might not want to participate in Boobquake. I don’t agree with the author, obviously, but I’m not a woman so my feelings on the subject are much less insightful. Read it, make up your own mind – is Boobquake a celebration of a woman’s freedom to dress as she want or is it another example of the liberation movement being co-opted into misogyny?