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Chillin’ with the Texas Board of Education

The Texas Board of Education recently approved changes to the state's high school social studies curriculum. The Board also has responsibility for reviewing and approving textbooks for use in Texas schools according to whether they meet its curriculum standards, so its move will effectively force textbook publishers to revise their presentation of American history. The curriculum revisions are controversial because many observers believe that they are motivated by, and reflect, an extreme conservative view of American history.

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A nick for Nick, but nix to nicks for Nickie?

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has come under fire for a policy statement that has a more nuanced approach to female circumcision (FC) than its previous absolute opposition. The new policy proposes that the law be changed to allow pediatricians to perform a ritual ‘nick’ as a compromise where families request female circumcision. The AAP document strongly opposes all female circumcision that would lead to physical or psychological harm, but suggest that pricking or incising the skin of the external genitalia in females is less harmful than ear piercing. This has led to outrage from groups who oppose female circumcision in all forms.

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Lord Justice Nero?

There is
a shrill, unpleasant new sound in the UK church. It is the sound of
conservative Christians saying that they are persecuted. It’s the voice of a
minority. And as Rowan Williams trenchantly observed: ‘The Church of England is
like a swimming pool: all the noise comes from the shallow end.’ The claim of
persecution is an insult to the vast numbers of Christians in the world who really
are persecuted. Please read the Bible and the history books before going on
prime time TV to say that you’re persecuted. 

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The Christian Right is Wrong

An interesting document has just dropped into my in-box. It is a ‘Declaration of Christian Conscience’, to be found at www.westminster10.org.uk

It is signed by a number of Christian leaders, all of them noted for their theological conservatism. Christians across the land are being urged to sign the declaration to demonstrate the demographic power of conservative Christianity.

Some of the lead signatories are my friends, and I agree with many of the principles articulated, but this document is a disaster. It will reduce significantly the ability of Christians to make a contribution to public life. And that’s a shame.

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A Secular Foothold?

“Insofar as modern
liberal discourse rests on a distinction between reasons that emerge in the
course of disinterested observation — secular reasons — and reasons that flow
from a prior metaphysical commitment, it hasn’t got a leg to stand on.”

And so
Stanley Fish concludes his recent
column about the role of secular reasons and religion in public life. While
he briefly touches on a number of issues that stem from this ongoing debate, he
focuses his commentary on the ideas of Stephen Smith, whose new book is called The Disenchantment of
Secular Discourse. Since much of Smith’s argument circles around the
notion of secular reasons, Fish begins by explaining what these reasons are all
about.

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Aid Beyond Belief

The days following the devastating
earthquake in Haiti
saw a surge in fundraising efforts from organizations all over the world. In
this charitable climate, the atheist scientist Richard Dawkins set up an aid
campaign of his own: Non-Believers
Giving Aid. Why donate through his group? In addition to rallying fellow
non-believers, Dawkins claims this offers a chance to “counter the scandalous
myth that only the religious care about their fellow-humans.” There are a host
of issues that could be discussed in relation to the aid effort and belief –
why we feel compelled to help distant strangers, the problem of suffering, the
idea of natural disasters as divine punishment – but I’ll concentrate on two
main objections to Dawkins.

One objection would be that the
entire project is simply a shameless propaganda scheme to get more “data” on charity
giving among non-believers. Its purpose is to give the non-believers some
numbers to point to, some “proof” that they give lots of money to charity. And
for that reason, it is just an opportunistic ploy that is deeply inappropriate in
a time of real crisis and tragedy.

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Why the minaret ban?

I would
like to try and throw additional light on the motives that led a majority of
Swiss voters to a surprise acceptance, on November 29, of an initiative
forbidding the construction of future minarets – already commented on by
Russell Powell in his entry on this very blog yesterday. Some supporters of the
initiative, such as far-right politician Ulrich Schlüer, who co-launched it
(and was already notorious for his questionable campaign in 2004 against simplified
naturalisation procedures), might simply want to prevent any minority with a
cultural and religious background different from their own from expanding and
expressing itself. Others might have been misled into thinking that all Muslims
are extremists, supporting terrorist attacks. Yet I also suspect that a
significant proportion of those who endorsed the minaret ban, while not being
fundamentally hostile to Islam, might have been motivated by the worry that the
further expansion of the Muslim community in Switzerland (and Europe in
general) poses a threat to certain core values of Western liberal democracies,
such as gender equality, freedom of speech, and the separation between church
and state.

 

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A Controversial Use of Taxpayer Funds

The health care reform bill currently being debated in the United States has re-ignited controversy there over abortion, and in particular over the availability of federal government funding to pay for the procedure. Earlier this month, the House of Representatives version of the health care bill passed narrowly, and with a last minute amendment that will restrict provision of abortions. The so-called “Stupak amendment” says that no health care plans receiving any subsidy from the federal government may offer abortions, except in the case where abortion is the result of rape, incest, or to save the woman’s life, and it maintains this restriction even if the government subsidies are kept separate from the private payments made into the plans, and no government subsidy is ever used to pay for abortions. The Stupak amendment represents a tightening over existing policy, according to which the federal government is prohibited from directly funding the provision of abortions, but may provide funds for hospitals, for example, that also provide abortions – so long as the hospitals pay for the abortions themselves by some other means.

The argument for Stupak’s additional restrictions on abortion funding is supposed to be that since money is fungible, the old prohibition does not really work to prevent federal funds indirectly playing a role in providing for abortions. Whatever the merits of this argument, it’s worth noting that many of its proponents in congress make it hypocritically; they are more than willing to accept generous campaign contributions drawn from the profits of health insurance companies that provide insurance for abortions as a component of their plans. But I want to focus here on the question of having any restriction of this kind at all. Can the federal government legitimately be prohibited from funding abortion?

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God and Chance

As Paul Ewart points out in an interesting recent Guardian article ‘Why God Needs Chance’ —
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/nov/03/god-chance-philosophy-atheism — chance events which result in certain individuals’ suffering undeservedly raise a version of the traditional ‘problem of evil’ for theists. If God, who is meant to be all-good and omnipotent, were to exist, how could he allow such chance events to occur?

Ewart goes on to argue that, if God is indeed to be omnipotent, chance may in fact be required. Here’s how I understand his argument. If the outcomes of our actions were entirely predictable, and we had free will, we could, in theory, force God to act to prevent some bad outcome. ‘So’, Ewart says, ‘God would no longer be in control – his actions would be determined by ours.’ But, because of chance, we can’t in fact predict the outcomes of our actions for sure, so we’re unable to distinguish what would be an act of God from a random event. So God remains omnipotent, because we can’t force him to act.

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Who defines a Jew?

by David Edmonds

 

Here are some of the relevant facts about a landmark legal ruling last week – involving a dispute that illustrates an irresolvable tension within multi-culturalism. 

 

JFS is a Jewish ‘faith school’ in North London.  It achieves impressive academic results.  Faith schools’ are perfectly legal – indeed, they seem to have been encouraged by this government.  If oversubscribed, as the JFS usually is, faith schools are allowed to favour members of their faith.  There are many Christian and Islamic faith schools.

 

The legal case involved a boy, ‘M’.  JFS refused M a place because his mother, who was not born Jewish, converted to Judaism in a Progressive synagogue.  This conversion process is not recognized by the Office of the Chief Rabbi (OCR).  The family of the boy regularly attended Progressive synagogue.  

The Court of Appeal has just ruled that the JFS’s admissions policy contravened the Race Relations Act because of the requirement that for a pupil to qualify for admission “his mother must be Jewish, whether by descent or by conversion’.  This, the court said, was a “test of ethnicity”.

Here are a few minor comments about this case.

 

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