Why Atheists need rituals too

To move many away from religion, atheism has to weave itself into the social fabric and shed its image of dour grumpiness

• 
• • Suzanne Moore for New Humanist, part of the Guardian Comment Network
  • theguardian.com, Friday 27 December 2013 12.59 GMT

A billboard sponsored by the American Atheists organisation in New York. Photograph: Richard Levine/Demotix/Corbis

The last time I put my own atheism through the spin cycle rather than simply wiping it clean was when I wanted to make a ceremony after the birth of my third child. Would it be a blessing? From who? What does the common notion of a new baby as a gift mean? How would we make it meaningful to the people we invited who were from different faiths? And, importantly, what would it look like?

One of the problems I have with the New Atheism is that it fixates on ethics, ignoring aesthetics at its peril. It tends also towards atomisation, relying on abstracts such as "civic law" to conjure a collective experience. But I love ritual, because it is through ritual that we remake and strengthen our social bonds. As I write, down the road there is a memorial being held for Lou Reed, hosted by the local Unitarian church. Most people there will have no belief in God but will feel glad to be part of a shared appreciation of a man whose god was rock'n'roll.

When it came to making a ceremony, I really did not want the austerity of some humanist events I have attended, where I feel the sensual world is rejected. This is what I mean about aesthetics. Do we cede them to the religious and just look like a bunch of Calvinists? I found myself turning to flowers, flames and incense. Is there anything more beautiful than the offerings made all over the world, of tiny flames and blossom on leaves floating on water?

Already, I am revealing a kind of neo-paganism that hardcore rationalist will find unacceptable. But they find most human things unacceptable. For me, not believing in God does not mean one has to forgo poetry, magic, the chaos of ritual, the remaking of shared bonds. I fear ultra-orthodox atheism has come to resemble a rigid and patriarchal faith itself.

This is not about reclaiming "feeling" as female and reason as male. Put simply, it seems to be fundamentally human to seek narratives, find patterns and create rituals to include others in the meanings we make. If we want a more secular society – and we most certainly do – there is nothing wrong with making it look and feel good.

Yet as I attend yet another overpoweringly religious funeral of a woman who was not religious – as I did recently – I see that people do not know what else to do. They turn to organised religion's hatch 'em, match 'em and dispatch 'em certainties. For while humanists work hard to create new ceremonies, many find them vapid. Funerals are problematic, as one is bound by law to dispose of the body in a certain way. I always remember the startled look of the platitudinous young vicar who visited our house after my grandad died, when my mum said, "Don't come round here with your mumbo-jumbo. If I had my way I'd put him in the vegetable patch with some lime on him."

Unless someone has planned their own funeral it can be difficult, but naming or partnership ceremonies are a chance to think about what it is we are celebrating. A new person, love, being part of a community. For my daughter's, we pieced together what we wanted, but I found some of the humanist suggestions strange. "Odd parents" for godparents? No thanks. I guess it's just a matter of taste.

What, then, makes ceremony powerful? It is the recognition of common humanity; and it is very hard to do this without borrowing from traditional symbols. We need to create a space outside of everyday life to do this. We can call it sacred space but the demarcation of special times or spaces is not the prerogative only of the religious. One of the best ceremonies of late was the opening of the Olympics, where Danny Boyle created a massive spectacle that communicated shared values in a non-religious way. It was big-budget joy. Most of us don't have such a budget but there has to be some nuance here. We may not have God. We may find the fuzziness of new age thinking with its emphasis on "nature" and "spirit" impure, but to dismiss the human need to express transcendence and connection with others as stupid is itself stupid.

Our ceremony had flowers and fires and Dylan, a Baptist minister and the Jabberwocky, half-Mexican siblings and symbols, a Catholic grandparent reading her prayer, a Muslim godparent and kids off their heads on helium at the party. A right old mishmash, then, but our mishmash.

In saying this I realise I am not a good atheist. Rather like mothering, perhaps I can only be a good enough one. But to move many away from religion, a viable atheism has to weave itself into the social fabric and shed this image of dour grumpiness. What can be richer than the celebration of our common humanity? Here is magic, colour, poetry. Life.

America's 'virgin births'? One in 200 mothers 'became pregnant without having sex'

Rob Williams in The Independent

The results of a long-term study of reproductive health, published in the British Medical Journal, have revealed that one in two hundred US women claim to have given birth without ever having had sexual intercourse.

The findings were based on a study of 7,870 women and girls aged 15 to 28, as part of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which ran from 1995 to 2009.

The Christmas issue of the BMJ reports that, of the women who took part in the study, 45 (0.5%) reported at least one virgin pregnancy, "unrelated to the use of assisted reproductive technology."

In short, they claimed to have conceived - yet had not had vaginal intercourse or in-vitro fertilisation (IVF).

The BMJ article notes that virgin births, or parthenogenesis (from the Greek parthenos for virgin and genesis for birth), can occur in non-humans as a consequence of "asexual reproduction, where growth and development of the embryo occurs without fertilization".

The article notes that as well as the story of the birth of Jesus to the Virgin Mary, parthenogenesis often appears in popular culture, "including the Spielberg blockbuster Jurassic Park3 and the 2008 Dr Who episode “Partners in Crime.”

For the study of putative virgin pregnancies, researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill analyzed data from the thousands of teenage girls and young women who took part in the long-running study.

They found that the girls who had become pregnant, despite claiming they had never had sex at the time of conception, shared some common characteristics.

Thirty-one per cent of the girls had signed a so-called 'chastity pledge', whereby they vow - usually for religious reasons - not to have sex. Fifteen per cent of non-virgins who became pregnant also said they had signed such pledges.

The 45 self-described virgins who reported having become pregnant and the 36 who gave birth were also more likely than non-virgins to say their parents never or rarely talked to them about sex and birth control.

About 28 per cent of the "virgin" mothers' parents (who were also interviewed) indicated they didn't have enough knowledge to discuss sex and contraception with their daughters, compared to 5 percent of the parents of girls who became pregnant and said they had had intercourse.

The authors of the study, entitled "Like a virgin (mother)", - say that such scientifically impossible claims show researchers must take care in interpreting self-reported behavior. Fallible memory, beliefs and wishes can cause people to err in what they tell scientists.

On the Death Penalty for Kasab

M J Akbar in the Times of India

There is only one way to be born, but many ways to die. Both remain a cosmic mystery despite the best efforts of atheists to reduce them to banality. That is where the similarity ends. 

Birth is a symphony of joy. Death orchestrates a range of atonal emotions. Grief is only one of the many narratives surrounding death, and it is contained. Even those who have lost an anchor of love recognize that food must return to the table of lament. Religion offers its rationale; as in the Quranic verse, from God we come, to God we go, a belief shared by all the Abrahamic faiths. But human beings do not leave all death to the will of God. They kill, singly and collectively. The individual does so for criminal reasons; the state in the pursuit of justice.

The first story in the Bible deals with the complicated morality of knowledge, and its primal consequence, birth and the flowering of earth. The second story is about murder. Cain, son of Adam and Eve, kills his brother Abel out of jealous fury. Murder, in any dimension, has remained a magnetic fact ever since. Societies have invested huge repositories of finance and intellect in weapons; man has split the atom and mobilized the biological germ in his inventive efforts to kill in as many ways as possible. There is a vast literature of death, from warfare disguised as history to the less-than-innocent pleasures of a murder mystery novel. In either case we hope to reach calm through turbulence through the road map of justice. An eye for an eye establishes the balance of fear. Deterrence cuts through the knot that cannot be unraveled. It is not necessarily equal retaliation, but it must be effective retaliation. The dead cannot be resurrected but the killer must be found and punished.

War was kept exempt from the rules of murder. The Romans understood the arbitrary nature of the battlefield and introduced decimation: a victorious general could send a ruthless signal by lining up prisoners of war and dispatching every tenth man in the queue. It was one man playing dice with another man's destiny. The only thing that could be said in its favor was that it was better than the reverse, nine dead to one alive. But as the savagery of even war crossed limits that were inconceivable by the 20th century, war crimes were invented. They were widely advertized as evidence of civilization. Then terrorism came along. We still have not secured rules for this brutality.The progress of civilization is a bundle of questions in search of an ever-elusive ideal. We have left the monarch's absolute authority over life and death behind. Gone are the days when theft of a sheep was a hanging offence. Most of the world has either adopted a rule of law where evidence must be produced and confirmed, or is moving towards it. Reform has even come to religious law: no one cuts off the hands of a thief anymore. If theft can be eliminated by lesser punishment, then the purpose is served.But one area where reform has paused for intense debate is in capital punishment. The argument for abolition is persuasive in the genteel atmosphere of liberal values. Systems of justice are human, and therefore prone to error or bitter degrees of bias. Far better that ten guilty persons are declared innocent at the end of a trial than one innocent person dies.

This begs a question. Should the generosity of civilized behavior extend to those who have deliberately, maliciously chosen to be barbaric? We understand different grades of murder. The crime of passion is even celebrated in high drama or poetry. But the terrorist and the tyrant emerge from the same seed. Both gorge on the blood of innocents. This is all the more reason why we should define both with moral and intellectual rigor. To do less would be to dilute their evil.Abolition of death penalty for them would create an equivalence that cannot be sustained in theory or practice. 

Darkness is the best friend of a terrorist; stealth and deception his preferred strategy for it helps him escape through the fog of theories spun by pseudo-analysts. When, occasionally, a terrorist works in the open he still craves for the mantle of a jurisprudence created for civilians who have abandoned civility. Liberal nations like India do not deny this privilege to their worst enemy. But India cannot withhold justice when a judge has made his call on terrorism. Such complacence would weaken the liberal safety net to the point of disintegration. Ajmal Kasab's mentors are safe, beyond the reach of Indian law. Kasab could not be allowed to escape the rope of Indian justice.

The 1% are the very best destroyers of wealth the world has ever seen

Our common treasury in the last 30 years has been captured by industrial psychopaths. That's why we're nearly bankrupt

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 7 November 2011 20.30 GMT
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Illustration by Daniel Pudles

If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. The claims that the ultra-rich 1% make for themselves – that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive – are examples of the self-attribution fallacy. This means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren't responsible. Many of those who are rich today got there because they were able to capture certain jobs. This capture owes less to talent and intelligence than to a combination of the ruthless exploitation of others and accidents of birth, as such jobs are taken disproportionately by people born in certain places and into certain classes.

The findings of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel economics prize, are devastating to the beliefs that financial high-fliers entertain about themselves. He discovered that their apparent success is a cognitive illusion. For example, he studied the results achieved by 25 wealth advisers across eight years. He found that the consistency of their performance was zero. "The results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill." Those who received the biggest bonuses had simply got lucky.

Such results have been widely replicated. They show that traders and fund managers throughout Wall Street receive their massive remuneration for doing no better than would a chimpanzee flipping a coin. When Kahneman tried to point this out, they blanked him. "The illusion of skill … is deeply ingrained in their culture."

So much for the financial sector and its super-educated analysts. As for other kinds of business, you tell me. Is your boss possessed of judgment, vision and management skills superior to those of anyone else in the firm, or did he or she get there through bluff, bullshit and bullying?

In a study published by the journal Psychology, Crime and Law, Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon tested 39 senior managers and chief executives from leading British businesses. They compared the results to the same tests on patients at Broadmoor special hospital, where people who have been convicted of serious crimes are incarcerated. On certain indicators of psychopathy, the bosses's scores either matched or exceeded those of the patients. In fact, on these criteria, they beat even the subset of patients who had been diagnosed with psychopathic personality disorders.

The psychopathic traits on which the bosses scored so highly, Board and Fritzon point out, closely resemble the characteristics that companies look for. Those who have these traits often possess great skill in flattering and manipulating powerful people. Egocentricity, a strong sense of entitlement, a readiness to exploit others and a lack of empathy and conscience are also unlikely to damage their prospects in many corporations.

In their book Snakes in Suits, Paul Babiak and Robert Hare point out that as the old corporate bureaucracies have been replaced by flexible, ever-changing structures, and as team players are deemed less valuable than competitive risk-takers, psychopathic traits are more likely to be selected and rewarded. Reading their work, it seems to me that if you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a poor family, you're likely to go to prison. If you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a rich family, you're likely to go to business school.

This is not to suggest that all executives are psychopaths. It is to suggest that the economy has been rewarding the wrong skills. As the bosses have shaken off the trade unions and captured both regulators and tax authorities, the distinction between the productive and rentier upper classes has broken down. Chief executives now behave like dukes, extracting from their financial estates sums out of all proportion to the work they do or the value they generate, sums that sometimes exhaust the businesses they parasitise. They are no more deserving of the share of wealth they've captured than oil sheikhs.

The rest of us are invited, by governments and by fawning interviews in the press, to subscribe to their myth of election: the belief that they are possessed of superhuman talents. The very rich are often described as wealth creators. But they have preyed on the earth's natural wealth and their workers' labour and creativity, impoverishing both people and planet. Now they have almost bankrupted us. The wealth creators of neoliberal mythology are some of the most effective wealth destroyers the world has ever seen.

What has happened over the past 30 years is the capture of the world's common treasury by a handful of people, assisted by neoliberal policies which were first imposed on rich nations by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. I am now going to bombard you with figures. I'm sorry about that, but these numbers need to be tattooed on our minds. Between 1947 and 1979, productivity in the US rose by 119%, while the income of the bottom fifth of the population rose by 122%. But from 1979 to 2009, productivity rose by 80%, while the income of the bottom fifth fell by 4%. In roughly the same period, the income of the top 1% rose by 270%.

In the UK, the money earned by the poorest tenth fell by 12% between 1999 and 2009, while the money made by the richest 10th rose by 37%. The Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality, climbed in this country from 26 in 1979 to 40 in 2009.

In his book The Haves and the Have Nots, Branko Milanovic tries to discover who was the richest person who has ever lived. Beginning with the loaded Roman triumvir Marcus Crassus, he measures wealth according to the quantity of his compatriots' labour a rich man could buy. It appears that the richest man to have lived in the past 2,000 years is alive today. Carlos Slim could buy the labour of 440,000 average Mexicans. This makes him 14 times as rich as Crassus, nine times as rich as Carnegie and four times as rich as Rockefeller.

Until recently, we were mesmerised by the bosses' self-attribution. Their acolytes, in academia, the media, thinktanks and government, created an extensive infrastructure of junk economics and flattery to justify their seizure of other people's wealth. So immersed in this nonsense did we become that we seldom challenged its veracity.

This is now changing. On Sunday evening I witnessed a remarkable thing: a debate on the steps of St Paul's Cathedral between Stuart Fraser, chairman of the Corporation of the City of London, another official from the corporation, the turbulent priest Father William Taylor, John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network and the people of Occupy London. It had something of the flavour of the Putney debates of 1647. For the first time in decades – and all credit to the corporation officials for turning up – financial power was obliged to answer directly to the people.
It felt like history being made. The undeserving rich are now in the frame, and the rest of us want our money back.

Could your star sign affect what you earn? Yes, says IFS

Could your star sign or the month of your birth affect how likely you are to hold down a job and what you will earn?
Yes, according to new research by no less an authority than the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), whose research was funded by the Nuffield Foundation.

But the explanation has less to do with astrology than how old you were relative to classmates at school. Previous research published by the IFS indicated that children born at the start of the academic year tend to achieve better exam results, on average, than children born at the end of the academic year.

In England, this means that children born in the autumn tend to outperform those born in the summer. New research published today by the IFS, and funded by the Nuffield Foundation, shows that your date of birth also matters after schooldays. Compared to children born in September, those born in August are 20pc more likely to study for vocational qualifications – if they attend tertiary education at all – and 20pc less likely to attend a Russell Group or top notch university.

Claire Crawford, a director of the IFS and one of the authors of the report, said: “Studying for academic qualifications, attending a Russell Group university, and believing that you have control over your own life are all associated with a greater chance of being in work and having higher wages later in life.
This suggests that August-born children may end up doing worse than September-born children throughout their working lives, simply because of the month in which they were born.”

That’s good news for children born recently – who will have the star signs Scorpio, Libra and Virgo – but less encouraging for those born in the summer – with the star signs Leo, Cancer and Gemini. Are the latter really more likely to end up as Neets; Not in Employment, Education or Training?

For my part, I have always thought astrology is nonsense. But, as a former girlfriend pointed out: “You’re a typical  Virgoan, so you would say that, wouldn’t you?”

Consumption is the real problem, not population growth.

Beyond the headlines from the UN population report lies a clear message: consumption is still a far bigger threat to the planet

By George Monbiot

A worker repairs a grain lifter on a soy bean mountain in Salto, Argentina. Photograph: Diego Giudice/AP

 

It must rank among the most remarkable events in recent human history. In just 60 years, the global average number of children each woman bears has fallen from 6 to 2.5. This is an astonishing triumph for women's empowerment, and whatever your position on population growth, it is something we should celebrate.
But this decline in fertility, according to the United Natinos report published on Wednesday, is not the end of the story. It has also raised its estimate of global population growth. Rather than peaking at about 9 billion in the middle of this century, the UN says that human numbers will reach some 10 billion by 2100, and continue growing beyond that point.

That's the middle scenario. The highest of its range of estimates is an astonishing 15.8 billion by 2100. If this were correct, population would be a much greater problem – for both the environment and human development – than we had assumed. It would oblige me to change my views on yet another subject. But fortunately for my peace of mind, and, rather more importantly, for the prospects of everyone on earth, it is almost certainly baloney.

Writing in the journal Nature in May, Fred Pearce pointed out that the UN's revision arose not from any scientific research or analysis, but from what appeared to be an arbitrary decision to change one of the inputs it fed into its model. Its previous analysis was based on the assumption that the average number of children per woman would fall to 1.85 worldwide by 2100. But this year it changed the assumption to 2.1. This happens to be the population replacement rate: the point at which reproduction contributes to neither a fall nor a rise in the number of people.

The UN failed to explain this changed assumption, which appears to fly in the face of current trends, or to show why fertility decline should suddenly stop when it hit replacement level, rather than continuing beyond that point, as has happened to date in all such populations. I expected yesterday's report to contain the explanation, but I was wrong: it appears to have plucked its fertility figure out of the air.

Even so, even if we're to assume that the old figures are more realistic than the new ones, there's a problem. As the new report points out, "the escape from poverty and hunger is made more difficult by rapid population growth". It also adds to the pressure on the biosphere. But how big a problem is it?

If you believe the rich, elderly white men who dominate the population debate, it is the biggest one of all. In 2009 for example, a group of US billionaires met to decide which threat to the planet most urgently required their attention. Who'd have guessed? These men, who probably each consume as many of the world's resources in half an hour as the average African consumes in a lifetime, decided that it was population.
Population is the issue you blame if you can't admit to your own impacts: it's not us consuming, it's those brown people reproducing. It seems to be a reliable rule of environmental politics that the richer you are, the more likely you are to place population growth close to the top of the list of crimes against the planet.
The new report, inflated though its figures seem to be, will gravely disappoint the population obsessives. It cites Paul Murtaugh of Oregon State University, whose research shows that:

"An extra child born today in the United States, would, down the generations, produce an eventual carbon footprint seven times that of an extra child in China, 55 times that of an Indian child or 86 times that of a Nigerian child."

And it draws on a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which makes the first comprehensive assessment of how changes in population affect carbon dioxide emissions. It concludes:

"Slowing population growth could provide 16-19% of the emissions reductions suggested to be necessary by 2050 to avoid dangerous climate change."

In other words, it can make a contribution. But the other 81-84% will have to come from reducing consumption and changing technologies. The UN report concludes that "even if zero population growth were achieved, that would barely touch the climate problem".

This should not prevent us from strongly supporting the policies which will cause population to peak sooner rather than later. Sex education, the report shows, is crucial, as is access to contraception and the recognition of women's rights and improvement in their social status. All these have been important factors in the demographic transition the world has seen so far. We should also press for a better distribution of wealth: escaping from grinding poverty is another of the factors which have allowed women to have fewer children. The highly unequal system sustained by the rich white men who fulminate about population is one of the major reasons for population growth.

All this puts conservatives in a difficult position. They want to blame the poor for the environmental crisis by attributing it to population growth. Yet some of them oppose all the measures – better and earlier sex education, universal access to contraception (for teenagers among others), stronger rights for women, the redistribution of wealth – that are likely to reduce it.

And beyond these interventions, what do they intend to do about population growth? As the UN report points out:

"Considerable population growth continues today because of the high numbers of births in the 1950s and 1960s, which have resulted in larger base populations with millions of young people reaching their reproductive years over succeeding generations."

In other words, it's a hangover from an earlier period. It has been compounded by another astonishing transformation: since the 1950s, global life expectancy has risen from 48 to 68.

What this means is that even if all the measures I've mentioned here – education, contraception, rights, redistribution – were widely deployed today, there will still be a population bulge, as a result of the momentum generated 60 years ago. So what do they propose? Compulsory sterilisation? Mass killing? If not, they had better explain their programme.

Yes, population growth contributes to environmental problems. No, it is not the decisive factor. Even the availability of grain is affected more by rising livestock numbers and the use of biofuels – driven, again by consumption – than by human population growth.

Of course we should demand that governments help women regain control over their bodies. But beyond that there's little that can be done. We must instead decide how best to accommodate human numbers which will, at least for the next four decades, continue to rise.

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