Mandatory Prayer Has No Place In Our Schools!

  As an atheist and a parent, I have to make certain decisions regarding my children on the subject of religion. For example when my child asks, "Daddy, what happens when you die?" What do I say? Do I say "Oh, sweetie don't worry about it, when you die you go to heaven, and heaven is such a wonderful place." I couldn't in all good conscience tell her that. It would make me a hypocrite. But I also can't say "Well, darling, when you die you're nothing but worm food, dust in the ground." This would not go down too well, and many sleepless, worry filled nights would ensue. So, instead of committing to answer A or answer B, I opt for the politicians response, "Well, sweetie, some people believe that when you die, you go to heaven, and some people believe that there is no afterlife, but nobody really knows. The important thing to do is make the most of your life while you're living it." This answer, I know, is still not perfect, and it smacks of fence-sitting (as a highly opinionated person, this is not a position I am generally comfortable with), but if the choice is lie to my child or scare her to death, I'll opt for fence-sitting any day of the week. I use the same diplomatic response for all the other tricky question they throw at me, namely "Is God real?" and "Are there such things as ghosts?". Eventually, if I have done my job right, they will grow up and learn to think about these questions critically and, hopefully, they will arrive at the logical conclusions themselves.
  But there is a problem. They go to school (a UK school). And for the most part this a wonderful thing for them. School is the most important time of their lives. But while I'm at home being the diplomat, their teachers are bombarding them with religion while they're at school. And this isn't a faith school I'm sending them to. It has no attachment to any religious organisation, yet it observes christian prayer. Why does it observe christian prayer? I'll tell you why. Because it's the law!
  The School Standards And Framework Act 1998 (See Chapter VI - Religious Education & Worship) states that all pupils in state schools must take part in a daily act of collective worship, unless their parents request that they be excused from attending.
  The fact that my kids school is making my children pray is bad enough, but to find out that the law makes religious proselytising an obligation of the school was just infuriating to me. "But, hold on a minute," I hear the religious apologist say, "they've given you a get out clause, you can ask the school to excuse your children from the prayer, you atheists, you're always bloody moaning!" Yes, I could exclude my children from school prayer, but the question is why should I? It's not my children that shouldn't be in the school's assembly, it's the prayer! Why should I make an example of my children and have them ostracised and laughed at when they are asked to leave the room. We all know how kids can be, and this would not go unnoticed. No, I shouldn't need to embarrass my children in such a way. 
  Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not some whack job anti-religious parent that wants their child to know absolutely nothing about religion, I have already explained how I answer their queries on religious matters by explaining that different people believe different things, and that it's important for them to make up their own minds. I, for one (I know some will disagree with me), am not against religious education in schools. Religion, for better or worse (worse in my opinion), is a cultural phenomenon, it is practised the world over. It is therefore quite unavoidable. Teaching children what different cultures believe and the religious practises they observe is not necessarily a bad thing. As long as the person teaching them about these things is responsible and makes no attempt to indoctrinate the children, I don't believe there is anything wrong with them learning about it. After all, besides my love of science, the fact that I know so much about religion is one of the main reasons I am an atheist. 
  Prayer, is not religious education, it is religious observance, it is the indoctrination of our children. We send our children to school to learn, if we wanted them to observe prayer we would take them to church. How dare the government even think they have a right to tell our children what to believe. In my opinion, parents don't even have this right. It's down to the child and the child alone, when they are old enough to comprehend such matters, to make up their own minds.

  I am happy to report that work is being done. The National Secular Society has been working tirelessly to get this archaic law removed. In 2011 they released a "Collective Worship Briefing". This is essential reading for anyone seeking a basic overview of these issues. It outlines why collective worship is wrong, outdated, why it is a violation of our kids' basic human rights and what we can do to help. They have had a certain amount of success:

   

  In 2006, the NSS won a hard fought campaign to ensure that sixth-form pupils at main stream schools and maintained special schools were able withdraw themselves from collective worship, without the need for a parent's permission. Our lobbying resulted in an amendment to Section 55 of the Education and Inspections Act which now states:

"If a sixth-form pupil requests that he may be wholly or partly excused from attendance

at religious worship at a community, foundation or voluntary school, the pupil shall be

so excused."

   A story published on the 20th February of this year, reported the story of Veronica Wikman and her petition to rid Scotland's state schools of religious observation:

Veronica Wikman

Ms Wikman, who lives in south-west Edinburgh, said religious observation had nothing to do with education but everything to do with “religious indoctrination”.
 “The Church of Scotland has not owned our schools since 1872,” she said. “It should retain no privileged access to the education of my child or any other.
“As a parent, I’m forced to give the Church of Scotland joint custody in exchange for receiving state education for my child. That is outrageous.”


  Her petition, requests that the city council conducts a vote among councillors to remove religious observance  from non-denominational state schools, both primary and secondary. The petition required 500 signatures for the vote to be considered, and at the time of writing this it had received 961 signatures. This is clear evidence that there is genuine concern among the general public regarding this matter, but things seem to be moving so slowly.
  All atheists/secularists/humanists who are parents surely have an opinion on this subject. We have a duty to ensure that our children receive an education free from religious indoctrination. This is not what our schools are for. We need to set up our own petitions (mine is currently pending approval) and we need to write to our MP's telling them what an affront to our children's liberty this really is, which I will be doing myself shortly. Let's give the clergy at least one less place to spout their fairy stories.



 

If We Evolved From Monkeys...

"If humans evolved from Monkeys, why are they still monkeys?"
  
  If this question makes you facepalm so hard you feel your eyeballs will come out of your ears, I can deduce at least one thing about you: You know the answer to this question and realise why it's so ludicrous.
  I see this question asked so often it depresses me. If, like me, you are an avid user of Twitter you may be familiar with the user @takethatdarwin (if you're not, you should be). His primary aim is to bring this question to the attention of those who know how to answer it. Every day my timeline is awash with dozens and dozens of people asking this question and it's usually followed with the arrogant post script "Check mate atheists!" Or something similarly obtuse.

A typical @takethatdarwin ReTweet

 There are three types of people that post this question. The first type is the rarest, they are the genuinely curious people who know nothing about evolution and are seeking help in understanding it. These people are a joy to respond to, their follow up questions are usually intelligent and well considered. The second type of person, is more common. They are the trolls. We've all come across them. Dishonest people posting incendiary comments fishing for a reaction. In my experience these are quite easy to spot, and they are not worth bothering with. The third type of person is by FAR the most common. And they are, you guessed it, the religious. They seem to think they have the undoing of evolution in this one question, but really all they're doing is showing the world how little they actually know about the subject. Most of them don't even want a response. I have had abuse hurled at me on more than one occasion just for politely pointing out that we didn't evolve from monkeys, we share a common ancestor. A personal favourite is: "Fuck you! If I wanted your opinion I would have asked for it!" (Apparantley, posting an answer to a question posted on a public forum is the wrong thing to do!) Most of the religious people who post this question aren't particularly interested in the answer, they're programmed not to accept evolution and it doesn't matter how much evidence you show them, they will never change their mind. The question is merely their misguided attempt at mockery. They're having a good old laugh at "Those stupid evolutionists with their fossils and their theory."
  Some of them, however, are up for the debate. All debates with the religious on the subject of evolution follow a similar thread. They cite the "missing links" in the fossil record, the fact that you don't see a dog giving birth to a cat, irreducible complexity and the 2nd law of thermodynamics. All of these are easily rebuffed, but that doesn't bother them because they'll take you round and round in circles, throwing in the odd bible verse for good measure, until you're so bored you give up and go away. At which point they feel great because they think they've won, and you feel dejected because they missed the point completely. This has happened to me many, many times, and it will no doubt happen many, many more times in the future.
  In a perfect world we (the ones that know better) should treat these people just like we treat the trolls and give them a wide berth. We should leave them to wallow in their own blind faith and ignorance. But we don't. I certainly don't. Every time @takethatdarwin retweets that ridiculous question I fight hard to resist the temptation to respond. I tell myself it's pointless, that they're not really bothered. But ultimately I give in and respond, as I know many of you do. But the question is, why do we respond? We're basically pissing in the wind, why put ourselves through that on a daily basis?
  One reason we subject ourselves to this torture is because misinformation spreads. Many of these people have children. Children are very impressionable. Do you think these people are going to keep their misguided ill-informed ideas about evolution to themselves? No, of course they're not. The poor little mites are going to receive a hefty dose of their parent's ignorance. That thought alone is too much for many of us to bare. 
  Another reason we can't just walk on by when we come across such ignorance is because we care. We care about what's true. We care that they totally misunderstand the most basic ideas of evolutionary theory. We care that they don't even properly understand the definition of the word "theory". We care that they think it's a stupid idea. We care that they think evolution states that a monkey gave birth to a human. Yes, 99% of the time a response is utterly pointless and will ultimately achieve nothing, but at least we can say we tried.
 

The Things God Forgot To Mention

  Around about 3300 years ago (Give or take a decade or two) a group of men set about writing a book. This book was to be known as the bible. It is, according to some, the infallible word of God. These men were chosen by God to tell his story. So God dictated, and the authors listened.
  The Bible is puzzling to me in many ways. For instance, God is apparently all loving, but the Bible does not portray him in this way. Take one of the most well known stories from the Bible, Noah's Ark. Children love this story and it is often re-enacted in school plays across the globe. But everybody seems to forget that the main premise of the story was that God had essentially ordered the mass genocide of all living things (except the animals that swim and fly that is, but we won't get in to that particular plot hole). That doesn't seem like an all loving God to me.
  Let's go back even further, to the story (maybe fairy story would be more fitting?) of the very first humans created, Adam and Eve. I find it very puzzling that God felt the need to create a snake that would tempt Eve to eat of the apple from the forbidden tree. Why didn't he just not bother with the talking snake? More to the point what was the tree even doing there? Did God want us to mess up? Was our creation booby trapped from the start?
  I could go on all day. The Bible is littered with instances that betray God's "better" nature, and when Christians are taken to task over these things the answer is always the same, "God works in mysterious ways". This answer is unacceptable. In a world full of famine, disease and natural disasters, all of which God is supposedly more than capable of fixing, "God works in mysterious ways" just does not cut it.
  But the main thing that puzzles me about the Bible is not what is in it, it is what isn't in it. In Genesis, God makes the heavens and the earth. He also makes two "Lights", the greater light (the Sun) to watch over the day, and a lesser light (the Moon) to watch over the night. Hang on a minute. Two lights? Surely God knows that the light we get from the Moon is nothing more than reflected sunlight. Yet he makes no mention of this. But we'll come back to that. Let's move on.
  During the whole of the story of creation God is being awfully modest. He mentions the Earth, Moon and the Sun, yet he makes no mention of the other planets of our solar system. Beyond not mentioning the other planets in our solar system, he doesn't mention the planets in any of the other solar systems of the Milky Way. There are approximately 100 billion stars in our galaxy. A great many of the stars have planets orbiting them. There are approximately 170 billion galaxies in the known universe, each with their own billions of stars, and planets orbiting those stars. None of this is mentioned in the bible. Why not? Creating something as magnificent as our observable universe is a monumental achievement, yet God seemed quite content to stick with his humble little story, the creation of our Earth, the Sun and the Moon.
  There is one very good reason for God not mentioning the other planets in our solar system, or the other stars in our galaxy, or the other galaxies in our universe. And it's very simple. He didn't know about them. The main protagonist of any book is always limited to the knowledge of the author. Sheep herders of three and a half thousand years ago knew nothing of galaxies and planets. All they knew was there was one planet (Earth) because they were living on it. They also knew of the Sun and the Moon. This explains why God referred to the Moon as the lesser light. Ancient sheep herders weren't to know that the moonshine was nothing more than reflected sunlight. This is also why there are no dinosaurs in the bible, why god never mentions DNA, why God forgot to mention the marvellous way in which humans are connected to all other living creatures on the planet thanks to Evolution by means of natural selection. All these things (things we know a great deal about these days thanks to technological advances and scientific discovery) are missing from the Bible, simply because the authors knew nothing about them.
  If God was really talking through these people he could have easily mentioned all this, but he didn't do that. And again, you have to ask yourself why?
  The answer, uncomfortable as it may be to some people, is easy: The Bible isn't the word of God. It is a work of fiction, as is the character of God himself. It is a selection of historically inaccurate, scientifically impossible, mythical stories, not even original ones (the virgin birth and the resurrection being two of them. I'll be scrutinising them later.) that were written in an attempt to control the masses. And it worked. But what is mightily depressing is that in this age of scientific enlightenment, it is continuing to work.