Ongoing #39

And you thought I'd forgotten my continuing series of new poems.

No such luck.

Actually I thought hard before posting this one as it could best be characterised as an anti-religion poem and has the potential to offend. It isn't meant to. The cartoon is of a bishop but the impetus for the poem comes from my feeling that atheists are the last persecuted religious minority. I started to believe this when I first encountered Tony Blair's National Prayer Breakfast Speech in February last year. I blogged about it at the time. What worried me most about it was that he bent over backwards to name check every religion he could think of but seemed to be positively aggressive about non-believers, listing them together with terrorists as the cause of evil.

Thus do the extreme believers and the aggressive non-believers come together in unholy alliance.

At best he seemed to see us as doing God's work whether we know it or not, which is patronising to say the least and offensive to me as an atheist to put it more bluntly.

Neither do I decry the work of humanists, who give gladly of themselves for others and who can often shame the avowedly religious. Those who do God’s work are God’s people.

I find this all rather disturbing. My beliefs, which he would probably characterise as my lack of beliefs, should certainly be accorded the same respect that he seemed to accord those who follow a religion different to his. The fact that our country's Prime Minister had secretly held the views expressed in his speech, beliefs he only articulated after leaving office, disturbs me even more but that's a topic for another time.

Anyway, enough of the background. Here's the poem.

Signs and Symbols

They wear their signs and symbols
To witness their belief
In things they cannot evidence
That hold them yet in fief.
They show the signs and symbols
That bind them to their view
And spurn the voice of reason
As they join in retinue.
They have their signs and symbols
Each one a different set
To clearly mark the boundaries
Between spire and minaret.
They flaunt their signs and symbols
Like favours on their sleeve
Pay respect to different symbols
Of others who believe.
But for those who wear no symbols
They reserve their scorn and hate
The agnostic and the atheist
And the vilest apostate.

The Etymological Fallacy

This morning there was a discussion program on television which, after two relatively sensible topics, moved on to discussing the case of the Jedi Knight versus Tesco. The case, for anyone who missed it, revolved around a self-professed Jedi who was ejected from a supermarket because he refused to remove his hood, claiming it was an essential part of his faith. He's been making a fair amount of noise ever since about how this is religious discrimination and how a female follower of Islam can wear far more concealing garb without being ejected. The stated topic was "do ALL religions deserve equal status".
For me though the interesting part came not from him but from another member of the audience, a Raelist and it wasn't anything to do with his religion it was to do with a number of decidedly dodgy linguistic claims he made. First of all he claimed that the word "religion" means "a linking together of people" and that therefore anything that is such a linking is per se a religion.This is an intriguing bit of nonsense for a couple of reasons.
To begin with the origin of the term is obscure. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins suggests that it derives from Latin religio - an obligation or a bond between man and God. Another possibility is a connection with religo - to tie fast. So it might well have a connection with a link between man and God but not between people.
He also claimed the the word "cult" means "any system of religious beliefs". This is just plain wrong. It was originally derived from the Latin past particple of colare - till and is related to the word "cultivate". The "worship" meaning developed later.

Of course, even if these etymologies that he gave were both correct and certain, he would still be committing the etymological fallacy. This is the belief that the "real" meaning of a word is somehow fixed by whatever meaning it had in the earliest form that is traceable. So if, and I stress if, the word "religion" were derived from a word meaning "link" then that is the meaning it must have now. This is self evident nonsense. Words change their meanings all the time. To insist that a word should have a meaning it had a thousand years ago, and possibly in another language, is ridiculous. What kind of communication could there be if I insisted that "acid" meant "pointed, sharp", "brothel" meant "deteriorate" or "cheap" meant "innkeeper"?
All these are given as possible origins in the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins, though I confess that my linguistic prowess is not up to the research to get a more detailed handle on it. If you are interested in quite detailed word origins may I suggest subscribing to Bradshaw of the Future which has some very good discussions of miscellaneous words on it.

Meanwhile, I'd like to suggest that people trying to justify their odd beliefs should stop appealing to etymology to back them up.

Of Magic And Mystery

The last section in Best-Loved Poems is called "Of Magic And Mystery" and it's a little more straightforward than some of the others in that many of the poems clearly have some sort of spiritual content though I confess bewilderment at the inclusion here of one of my favourites - Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky.

Still to finish with a little flourish I have two poems for you. The first, The Atheists Lament, is brand new and the second, Strange Empire, a few years old. The latter may need some explanation but I'm not going to give any. You can work out the meaning for yourself. Why should I do all the work.

The Atheists Lament

In this modern England,
This multi-cultured isle,
We are built of many faiths from many lands.
Christians, Jews and Moslems
Hindus, Sikhs and more
And all of them agree that I am damned.
Some people worship one god
Though they give him different names
Others have whole pantheons and worship many
The one thing that unites them
Is that some god must be worshipped
And your soul will burn forever if you do not worship any.

Strange Empire

There are no fixed points here
In this Empire of the mind,
No guides to lead us from
The country of the blind.
The heavens hold no patterned truth.
Their mystery is a pedlar's lie.
No greater world stands out of view
Hidden beyond the speckled sky.

Evrything is a lie.
The words upon the page - a lie.
The ink that stains then fades - a lie.
The hand that neatly writes - a lie.
That mind that tries to guide - a lie.
There is no mind,
No hand,no pen, no ink
No words
No matter what we think.
Everything is a lie.

There are no fixed points here
In this Empire of the stranger,
No gimballed compass set in brass
To lead us out of danger.
The turned boards, the swirling leaves,
The crystal ball, the bones that fall
Are lies that act as reason's thieves
Wise men distrust them all.

Everything is a lie.
The stars seen through the glass - a lie.
The days and hours that pass - a lie.
The masquerades of life - a lie.
The freedom of the knife - a lie.
There is no knife,
No life, no time, no stars
No matter who we are.
Everything is a lie.

Sacrificing a Goat

I have recently finished reading Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science and Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst's Trick or Treatment, two books that cover largely similar ground. Goldacre’s book is lighter and more humorous, while Singh and Ernst’s is more focussed and more specific but both go heavily into the concepts of evidence based medicine and into why there is little or no evidence that alternate therapies such as chiropracty, homeopathy or acupuncture actually work, indeed there is evidence that they may actually be harmful. (On the whole there is no evidence that they work because they don’t, but that’s not what I’m writing about here.)
Both books include sections on why clever people believe stupid things.
However I think that there is a reason that clever people believe stupid things that is missing in both cases and it’s missing because the starting point for the argument is that people treat homeopathy and so on as if they were sciences and behave accordingly. People give the same credence to nonsense such as crystal healing as they do to antibiotics. To some extent this is true but I’d argue that most of these pseudo-sciences are, to all intents and purposes, much more like religions than sciences. They are filled with strange rituals and arcane language. They are administered by initiates to the inner mysteries. Above all they are based on faith. And that’s where the authors have missed something important.
Faith is, by definition, belief without proof. People don’t buy into the myths of Acupuncture or Chinese Herbal Medicines in spite of a lack of proof, they buy into them because of a lack of proof. The more you, as a rational scientist, come along with evidence that these therapies are all mumbo jumbo and that you might as well hang iron over your doorway to keep out the evil spirits or sacrifice a goat on the third Tuesday of every month to propitiate the gods, then the more they are vindicated in their faith. You are the heathen, the unbeliever. Your views count only inasmuch as by opposing them you are confirming that their faith is the true faith.
Conversely, if there was sudden, undeniable proof that homeopathy worked, it would become mainstream. It would cease to be faith and start to be truth. People would walk away from it in droves in search of something else they can believe in without being troubled by truth or facts, without worrying about the lack of any evidence whatsoever.
This need for faith is culturally programmed into humanity. Most people feel a need to have something that they can trust in unquestioningly, blindly, absolutely. GK Chesterton is supposed to have suggested that when people cease to believe in God rather than believing nothing, they will believe anything.* That’s precisely what is happening with alternative medicine. People are searching not for medical cures for a malaise of the body but for spiritual cures for a malaise of the soul.
I agree with virtually everything in either book. But I don’t think it will do any good. Telling, showing, proving that these so-called therapies are all rubbish will convince only those who want to be convinced. The true believers won’t take any notice at all. It’s like arguing with a Jehovah’s Witness on the doorstep. They believe what they believe and no amount of evidence to contrary can possibly change that. I confidently predict that twenty years, a hundred years, a thousand years from now people will still be putting their trust in quacks and crackpots, no matter what the state of medical science is at the time.

(*According to Wikiquote, this is a misattribution and comes from Emile Cammaert’s "The Laughing Prophets" where he is talking about Chesterton. It doesn’t alter the point though.)