the proceedings of the conway hall ethical society · harriet law i will focus on the figure of...

£1.50Vol. 118 No. 11 December 2013

Ethical RecordThe Proceedings of the Conway Hall Ethical Society

‘INFIDEL FEMINISM’ IN VICTORIAN FREETHOUGHT Laura Schwartz 3

MATHS ON TRIAL: HOW NUMBERS

GET USED AND ABUSED IN THE COURTROOM Coralie Colmez 8

NEW ADDITIONS TO THE HUMANIST LIBRARY Cathy Broad 12

SCIENCE AND THE RISE OF ATHEISM Russell Blackford 13

BOOk REvIEW: HUMANISM FOR INQUIRING MINDS

by Barbara Smoker Christopher Tofallis 17

VIEWPOINTS M McCarthy, D Rooum, B Smoker, D Langdown 18

BOOk REvIEW: DANGEROUS LIAISONS: THE CLASH BETWEEN ISLAMISM AND ZIONISM by Rumy Hasan Mazin Zeki 21

ONE DEATH ON THE SOMME Jennifer R Jeynes 22

FORTHCOMING EVENTS 24

EDITORIAL - A CONVENIENT TIME TO ‘FIRE’ TRIDENT?

The recent publication of a document outlining the plans for an independentScotland raised the question of how such a state would defend itself. Thedocument suggested that the process of shutting down the UK’s submarine basein Faslane should be started. Naturally, that would not please the BritishGovernment, which would have the difficult job of building another basesomewhere else. So the UK began presenting spurious arguments against thispossibility, such as that Scotland would be excluded from NATO.

But having nuclear weapons is not a condition of membership of NATO; theUSA, the UK and (when it feels like it) France, are the only nuclear powers inNATO. In any case, Scotland can offer other military assets to NATO involvingmuch less risk to itself. The real point is that Faslane is a strategic weakness inthe Trident system because it’s a fixed target of major importance. The advantageof being able to launch one’s missiles from submarines when at sea is their(alleged) untraceability and hence invulnerability – but the base represents aquite unnecessary danger to Scotland. I hope its days are numbered. Publicpressure famously forced the UK to remove those US missiles which could belaunched from England.

It’s time, therefore, to cancel the costly proposals for new subs and mothball theexisting ones. The UK is treaty-bound to oppose nuclear proliferation, a deadlythreat to the world, which it won’t achieve unless it demonstrates the will to leadthe world’s ‘2nd eleven’ nuclear powers (ie, ALL except the big two, USA andRussia) in a scheme for multilateral nuclear disarmament. Now that would becricket.

Ethical Record, December 2013 2

CONWAY HALL ETHICAL SOCIETYConway Hall Humanist Centre

25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL. www.conwayhall.org.uk

CONWAY HALL ETHICAL SOCIETY General Committee 13 November 2013 At this meeting the following were elected:

Chairman: Liz Lutgendorff; Vice-Chair: Giles Enders Treasurer: Carl Harrison; Editor: Norman Bacrac

{Please email texts and viewpoints for the Editor to: [email protected]}The following appointments were made by the GC on 13 November 2013:

Finance & Audit Sub-committeeCarl Harrison (Chair), Chris Bratcher, Giles Enders, Jay Ginn,

Liz Lutgendorff, James O’Malley.

Education & Arts Advisory GroupJames O’Malley (Chair), Norman Bacrac, Chris Bratcher,

Simon Callaghan, Susan Curtis-Kojakovic.Andrew Copson would be invited to be a member of this group.

Library Advisory GroupJim Walsh (Chair), Norman Bacrac, Carl Harrison, Liz Lutgendorff.

AGM OF CONWAY HALL ETHICAL SOCIETY, 10 NOVEMBER 2013The following were elected to the General Committee for 3 year terms: Chris Bratcher,Susan Curtis-Kojakovic, James O’Malley and Evan Parker and for the 1 year term,Stewart Ware. Existing members are Norman Bacrac, Simon Callaghan, Giles Enders,Jay Ginn, Carl Harrison, Liz Lutgendorff and Terry Mullins.

Re-elected as Holding Trustees at the AGM were Norman Bacrac, Terry Mullins andFiona Weir. Existing Holding Trustees are: Chris Bratcher, John Edwards, Giles Enders,Jay Ginn, Jim Herrick, Stephen Norley and Stewart Ware.

The AGM made the following Resolution (in part): That in all publicity for the Society andits activities, the words ‘Ethical Society’ appear at least as prominently as the words‘Conway Hall’.

New MembersWe welcome the following to the Society: Tom Beaton, Isleworth, Twickenham;

P J Corrigan, Hackney, London; Deborah Waters, Wapping, London

ObituaryWe regret to report the death of member Graham Kemish of Orpington. Graham died onthe 16th November 2013, after having contracted pneumonia which did not respond toantibiotics.

StaffChief Executive Officer: Jim Walsh Tel: 020 7061 6745 [email protected]: Martha Lee Tel: 020 7061 6741 [email protected] Officer: Linda Lamnica Tel: 020 7061 6740 [email protected]: Catherine Broad Tel: 020 7061 6747 [email protected]. Archivist Carl Harrison [email protected] Co-ordinator:Sid Rodrigues Tel: 020 7061 6744 [email protected] Officer: Carina Dvorak Tel: 020 7061 6750 [email protected]: Eva Aubrechtova (i/c) Tel: 020 7061 6743 [email protected] with: Brian Biagioni, Sean Foley, Tony Fraser, Rogerio Retuerma

Maintenance: Zia Hameed Tel: 020 7061 6742 [email protected]

‘INFIDEL FEMINISM’ IN VICTORIAN FREETHOUGHTLaura Schwartz, Warwick University

Lecture at Conway Hall, 29 October 2013, organised by the FreethoughtHistory Research Group, the Socialist History Society and Conway Hall

Ethical Society as part of its ‘Alternatives to Religion’ series

The nineteenth-century Secularist movement is generally perceived as a largelymasculine affair. Secularism did boast a small but active number of prominentfemale advocates and, even more strikingly, the movement also generated adistinctive brand of Freethinking or ‘Infidel Feminism’. How are we tounderstand the emergence of such strong support for women’s rights within amale-dominated, and potentially ‘macho’, movement?

Harriet LawI will focus on the figure of Harriet Law -- the infamous Secularist lecturer andjournalist who began her career in the 1850s when the Secular societies werenewly emerging, and retired in 1879 when the movement was nearing the heightof its powers. Women made up only about 12% of membership of the Secularsocieties. And yet, formally at least, Secularist structures were uncommonlyopen to female participation. Both men and women were permitted to run forexecutive positions in the National Secular Society, the British Secular Unionand the Freethought League.

For example, Harriet Law was president of the Freethought League in 1869 andwas repeatedly elected to (but declined) the position of vice president of theNational Secular Society. Annie Besant was elected to this position in 1875. Ata local level, Secular societies were relatively unusual in that their meetings,lectures and branch membership were open to women. My book, InfidelFeminism, looks at women who gained prominence within nineteenth and earlytwentieth-century Secularism as journalists, authors, and, perhaps mostinterestingly, as public lecturers.

Freethought had been home to a current of radical thinking on women’s positionin society since the early 1800s. The Freethinker and radical bookseller RichardCarlile published Every Woman’s Book, Or What is Love? in 1826, whichprovided information about birth control and gave a positive portrayal of femalesexuality.

In the 1830s and 40s, Owenite Freethought condemned the institution ofmarriage and the oppression of women in the capitalist system. These pro-woman arguments continued in the newly formed Secularist societies from the1850s onwards. By the 1880s all but one of the Secularist leaders (WilliamStuart Ross) supported the enfranchisement of women and the main Freethoughtjournals, such as The Reasoner, The National Reformer and the SecularChronicle, often contained calls for an end to women’s oppression the cause ofwhich they, unsurprisingly, attributed to religion… In 1877 Charles Bradlaughand Annie Besant deliberately engineered their own prosecution for thepublication of a birth control pamphlet, in order to highlight the need for freeaccess to such information.


Harriet Law, before her conversion to an atheist brand of Freethought, had beena pious member of the Baptist church. Harriet Law was born in Ongar, Essex in1831, the daughter of a farmer. She was moderately educated but impecunious.On arriving in London she began teaching in a Sunday school. As a piousmember of the Baptist Church, she attended the Philpot Street Secularist Hallwhere the leading Freethinker, George Jacob Holyoake, was giving his newvision for a national network of Secular societies.

As usual, the speaker’s remarks were followed by open discussion amongst theaudience, during which the young Harriet Law rose from her seat and forciblychallenged Holyoake with ‘Christian arguments’. Holyoake, impressed by herrhetorical skill, argued back. Over the next few months Law attended manymeetings of this kind, where she debated with the speaker and tried to defendChristianity in the face of Secularist criticism. She became increasinglypersuaded, however, of the arguments put forward by the Freethinkers and, in1855, she converted to their cause.

Harriet Law’s ‘path to atheism’ may have been dramatic, but it was not all thatunusual. Almost all the women who appear in my book Infidel Feminism had,prior to their conversion to Freethought, been devoted adherents of variousChristian churches. (In fact, Harriet Law often modelled herself on an earlierFreethinking feminist who had been involved in the Owenite Socialistmovement. Emma Martin had been a strict Baptist and pillar of her chapel inBristol before converting to atheism and socialism, leaving her dreary husbandand running off to London with her four daughters to join the struggle. Thisfusion of a rejection of a religion with a rejection of patriarchal authority in one’spersonal life is a common motif in the lives of many of these ‘infidel feminists’.Annie Besant, for example, also left her husband (a vicar) when she threw offher religious faith. Moreover, other male leading Freethinkers had also come toSecularism after daring while still Christians to debate the enemy infidel.

Nice Respectable Girls Reference to one’s former piety became a very useful rhetorical tool for manyFreethinkers, especially the women. It was a way for Freethinking feminists,particularly vulnerable to accusations of immorality, that they had been nicerespectable girls all their lives, and had only abandoned Christianity becausethey found it morally untenable. Many of them recalled that their loss of faithhad been a painful experience, entailing loss of community and social status aswell as emotional sustenance; they had only come to reject religion because theirintellectual honesty compelled them to do so. At the height of her fame as aSecularist, Harriet Law referred to her religious past as evidence of the fact thateven the most devoted of Christians could be made to see the light of reason.

Harriet Law began lecturing in 1859, while her husband, another Secularist,remained at home and cared for the children. Her lectures over two decadesspanned a wide range of political, feminist and anti-religious topics. As asalaried lecturer for the Secularist movement, no restrictions appear to have beenplaced on Harriet’s activities on account of her sex. Like her male counterpartsshe travelled the country, speaking in front of mixed sex audiences, answeringheckles and questions from the audience and joining in the often rowdy debates


that followed her speeches. Reports of her lecture tours can be found inSecularist journals such as the National Reformer and the Reasoner, and fromthese it does not appear that Law’s excited and opinionated audiences moderatedtheir behaviour simply because there was a woman on the platform. Law alsotook part in numerous one-to-one debates with her Christian opponents.

These formed a stock part of the Secularist repertoire and were often the mostuproarious of Freethought meetings, always with the potential to turn violent. In1870 Law was in the middle of delivering a lecture on ‘Martin Luther and ThomasPaine’ when small pebbles began to be thrown at the windows of the hall byresidents of Hebden Bridge who had gathered outside. At first Law ignored thisdisturbance and continued to lecture, but soon the beams supporting the buildingbegan to be hammered ‘by some person with a huge stone’ and the vibrationsalmost caused the large clock to fall off the wall onto the heads of the audience.Law, however, persevered with her lecture and managed to finish it. But ‘upon theexit of the lecturer, she was literally mobbed.’ She just managed to reach herlodgings for the night unharmed, but on the following day, when she returned togive a second lecture, ‘the crowd closed in upon her, notwithstanding the effortsof the police, and the lady received a blow in the right eye struck by a man’s fist,causing her great pain for a length of time…the mob was estimated at 2,000.’

Although it was not unheard of, it was certainly unusual for women during thisperiod to speak on rowdy public platforms and to engage in theologicaldisputation. The nineteenth century was marked by a variety of attempts bywomen to force their way into the public realm. Harriet Law was part of a smallgroup of female public speakers making their way onto platforms inorganisations such as the National Association for the Promotion of SocialScience and even sometimes in the Christian churches as ‘lady preachers’.However, Freethinking feminists were in the vanguard of those women seekingto push back restrictions to their entry into the public sphere. In particular theychallenged Christian arguments that had been used to exclude women from thepublic platform. Harriet Law claimed that her first doubts regarding her religiousfaith had been prompted by St. Paul’s decree that women should keep silent inthe churches, and she continually contrasted the silence imposed on Christianwomen with the freedom and equality of female Freethinkers.

The Bishop was Challenged by a WomanWhen, in 1876 Law accompanied Bradlaugh to debate the leader of the ChristianEvidence Society, Bishop Cloughton, the Bishop complained that ‘although hecame prepared to listen to men who challenged the truths of the gospel, he neverimagined that he should be called upon to meet a woman who had the effronteryto do the same.’ Harriet Law retorted that of course the Christian EvidenceSociety would never have allowed women to attend their annual meeting, fromfear that they might use their ‘brains and tongues’ to ‘disconcert’ the Episcopalauthority. Freethinking women were thus able to use Secularist opposition toreligion to legitimate their otherwise contentious public role as lecturers for themovement; the Freethought commitment to free inquiry, freedom of speech andthe free dissemination of knowledge opened up spaces for women to participatemore fully in the public and intellectual life of the movement.


Harriet Editor of the Secular ChronicleLaw assumed editorship of the leading Secularist periodical, Secular Chronicle,in 1876. She immediately introduced a ‘Ladies Page’ and made ‘no apology’ foremploying space in the journal to discuss the crucially important question offemale emancipation. Over the next three years, women’s rights formed one ofthe most frequently discussed issues in the journal. Like the National Reformerand the Reasoner, Harriet Law’s Secular Chronicle regularly reported on themeetings and progress of the various campaigns for female education andwomen’s suffrage, issues on which Harriet Law’s daughter -- Harriet Teresa Law-- also wrote articles.

The views expressed were firmly to the left of the contemporary mainstreamwomen’s rights movement. For example, Law’s atheism allowed her to reject thenotion of God-given gender roles or differences between men and women. Shethus published an article which claimed that it had not ‘as yet been proved thata man differs from a woman’ and as a result women should have full rights andduties in the governance of the polity -- including the vote and the right to sit inparliament. In discussing whether men and woman had natural and differenttalents, the author denied that any skill was definitely the domain of a particularsex. Even weaving and knitting, generally seen as something women had aspecial talent for, were acquired habits. The article concluded with what itclaimed were the words of Plato: ‘There is no function, my friend, among theentire members of our state that is peculiar to woman…but natural talents areindiscriminately diffused through both, and the woman naturally shares in alloffices the same as man.’

Harriet Law was not afraid of making these arguments with great force anddemanding that women’s rights needed to be part and parcel of the widerstruggle for democracy. In the agitation leading up to the 1868 Reform Act,which eventually enfranchised a significant proportion (though certainly not all)working-class men, Harriet supported the enfranchisement of all men andwomen. In this she even out-radicalised her own husband, who believed thatpeople needed a certain level of education to be eligible to vote. Harrietdismissed such caution. In 1866, when protesters in support of the Reform Billmarched to Hyde Park in the face of violent police opposition, Harriet Law wascarried by the crowd from place to place, and asked to give her speech on theenfranchisement of women.

In the Secular Chronicle Harriet Law also presented distinctively ‘infidelfeminist’ arguments. Like others in the Secularist movement, Harriet Law sawreligion as the root of all women’s oppression. The historical subordination ofwomen had been enshrined within the Judeo-Christian Scriptures and it wasargued that the rise of Christianity had led to a decline in women’s status acrossearly societies. In the first month of her editorship of the Secular Chronicle,Harriet wrote a long article on this subject, showing that ‘the Bible does assignwomen a distinct, and what is worse, a subordinate sphere, rendering her subjectto man in nearly every relationship of her life.’ She listed the many passages inscripture in which woman was assigned a passive and subordinate role to herhusband, father and brother, a trend which began with Genesis when Adam wastold to ‘rule over’ Eve. Women were subject to the lust and violence of ‘king,


priest, soldier and legislator’ ; they were afforded power and position in neitherthe church nor the state. She wrote that woman’s ‘only representative act, that ofplucking the fruit of the tree “of the knowledge of good and evil”, is describedas bringing disease, sin and death upon all; and eternal torment upon the greatmajority of mankind.’ Instead, Law sought to reclaim Eve as a Freethinkingfeminist heroine, for in disobeying God and eating from the tree of knowledge,Eve was in actual fact displaying those virtues that the Secularists valuedforemost - a desire for learning and an unwillingness to give into to those whowished to restrict freedom of inquiry. Harriet Law therefore argued that ‘insteadof cursing, we ought to reverence…[Eve’s] memory, as her partaking of theforbidden fruit was calculated to remove the evil of ignorance, which must beadmitted as the greatest of all evils.’

Disagreements with BradlaughHarriet Law resigned her editorship of the Secular Chronicle in 1879. As abusiness venture it had failed, and lost Law a considerable amount of money.Shortly after this, Law retired from her public Secularist activities though sheremained a Freethinker until her death. Her early retirement may have been dueto ill-health (she suffered from bronchitis) but was also partly a result of ahaving been gradually edged out of the movement by Charles Bradlaugh. Aswell as a committed feminist, Harriet Law was also a socialist and in 1867 hadbeen elected to Karl Marx’s First International. Bradlaugh’s well-knownhostility to socialism no doubt added to the already strained relations betweenhim and Law, due also to Law’s criticism of Bradlaugh’s authoritarian style ofleadership.

Harriet Law’s deconstruction of Judeo-Christian Scripture exposing it as aninherently patriarchal text; her historical analysis of women’s oppression, whichshe traced back to the rise of monotheistic religion; and her active interest in avariety of contemporary women’s rights causes, were typical of the movementas a whole. The contribution of Freethinking feminism to the wider nineteenth-century women’s movement needs, I believe, to be noted. Ultimately, I wouldargue that although Freethought did not inevitably lead to feminism, the act ofrenouncing religion (itself an inherently subversive act) called into question theunderlying assumptions of Victorian thinking on gender. Freethought enabledwomen such as Harriet Law to develop a radically different vision of women’srole in society.


CONWAY HALL ETHICAL SOCIETYReg. Charity No. 251396

Founded in 1793, the Society is a progressive movement whose aims are:

the study and dissemination of ethical principles based on humanism and freethoughtthe cultivation of a rational and humane way of life, and the advancement of research and education in relevant fields.

We invite to membership those who reject supernatural creeds and are insympathy with our aims. At Conway Hall the programme includes Sunday lectures,discussions, evening courses and the Conway Hall Sunday Concerts of chambermusic. The Society maintains a Humanist Library and Archives. The Society’sjournal, Ethical Record, is issued monthly. Memorial meetings may be arranged.

The annual subscription is £35 (£25 if a full-time student, unwaged or over 65)

MATHS ON TRIAL: HOW NUMBERS

GET USED AND ABUSED IN THE COURTROOM Coralie Colmez

Lecture to the Ethical Society, 3 November 2013

Maths may seem to be an unlikely protagonist at trials, but it has in fact madecountless appearances over the years. Common misconceptions held bywitnesses and juries mean that grave mistakes are often made. The followingstories tell of such mistakes and their consequences.

The Case of Sally Clark – Are Cot Deaths Independent Events?Sally Clark and her husband Steve were both lawyers, living a quiet life justoutside London in the 1990s. But when their first son, and a couple of yearslater their second, died suddenly, Sally was accused of having killed them.

On the stand at her trial was Sir Roy Meadow, an expert on cot deaths and childabuse who also testified at the trials of dozens of other women accused of thesame crime. He explained that it was statistically extremely unlikely for the twodeaths of the little boys to have been accidental. Indeed, a large study showedthat the probability of a single cot death happening in a family like the Clark’s(a wealthy and healthy environment) was about 1 in 8,500. The probability oftwo of them happening in the same family was therefore the square of thatnumber (8500 x 8500), about 1 in 72 million – such a tiny chance that it wasinconceivable that this had indeed happened. The deaths weren’t accidental, heclaimed: Sally must have killed her sons.

She was sentenced to a life in prison, but Steve and others who felt that a graveinjustice had taken place didn’t give up fighting to clear her name.

Meadow’s mathematical argument was attacked by the Royal Statistical Societyamongst others. In making his calculation, Meadow had assumed that the cotdeaths were independent from each other*. In the case of dependent events,individual probabilities should not be multiplied together.

There is very good reason to think that cot deaths are not independent — forexample they may be caused by genetic factors. In addition, medical documentswere found that showed that one of Sally’s sons suffered from signs of a seriousinfection at the time of his death, making this its likely cause.

*{where it is correct to multiply the probabilities together. Eg if the chance oftossing a head is one half, and the chance of its being a head on the second tossis also one half, then the probability of getting two heads is one quarter (½ x ½).Note, however, that if one obtained, say, eight heads in succession (probabilityof only 1 in 256) one would begin to suspect that the coin was biased in favourof heads, ie, the probability of heads per toss was greater than 50%. Similarly,if, say, a genetic factor had predisposed the Clark’s children to cot death, theirlikelihood of suffering it would be much greater than the 1 in 8500 figure usedby Meadow. [Ed]}


After over three years in prison, Sally’s conviction was overturned and she wasfreed, paving the way for similar appeals by other mothers at whose trialsMeadow had testified. But Sally could never get over the trauma she hadexperienced. She died just four years later of alcoholism.

The mistake made by Roy Meadow – multiplying non-independent probabilities– isn’t a new one. It was made many years before at one of the landmark trialsfor the use of mathematics in court.

The Collins CaseIn 1964 in Los Angeles, an old woman named Juanita was walking along a smallalleyway when she was violently pushed from behind and fell to the ground.When she looked up, she saw a blond woman running away with her purse. Atthe end of the alleyway stood John Bass, who was tending to his front lawn. Hesaw the blond woman burst out of the street and jump into a waiting car. The carwas yellow, and the driver was a black man with a beard and a moustache.

When Juanita and John reported this to the police, Officer Kinsey who was incharge of the case felt that the description of the suspects was so unusual –interracial couples were very rare at the time – that if he found a couple thatmatched it, they would surely be the right one. He asked around and soon cameacross Malcolm and Janet Collins, who owned a yellow Lincoln.

The couple were accused of the theft, but it became clear at the trial that therewasn’t enough evidence to convict them. They didn’t have an alibi but neitherJuanita nor John were able to identify either of the Collinses in a lineup, and thedescriptions didn’t match exactly – for example, Malcolm was shaven, though itwas proven that he sometimes wore a beard and moustache.

The prosecutor on their case was the innovative Ray Sinetar, who felt frustratedthat he couldn’t explain to the jury what he felt he knew intuitively – it was sorare to find a couple fitting Juanita and John’s description that the Collinses hadto be guilty. He decided to translate the situation into mathematical terms, andmade a list of the characteristics, with their associated probabilities.

Ray Sinetar’s List of Probabilities:

• Black man with a beard: 1 out of 10• Man with moustache: 1 out of 4• White woman with blonde hair: 1 out of 3• Woman with a ponytail: 1 out of 10• Interracial couple in car: 1 out of 1,000• Yellow car: 1 out of 10

Finally, assuming each item was entirely independent of the others, hemultiplied all these together to obtain the tiny chance of 1 in 12 million offinding such a couple. The Collinses were convicted. Janet was sentenced to ayear in prison and Malcolm, who had a prior conviction, was put away for evenlonger. Malcolm appealed, and fortunately for him his case fell into the hands ofa young Laurence Tribe, who would later go on to become a law professor at


Harvard and argue for Al Gore in front of the Supreme Court. At the time, Tribewas just a clerk, but one who had studied mathematics at undergraduate level.He pointed out that – in addition to having simply plucked the probabilities inhis argument out of his head – Sinetar had multiplied together probabilitiescorresponding to events that were clearly not independent, such as for examplea man wearing both a beard and a moustache.

Malcolm was released and a small case which should have been quicklyforgotten became a poster case for Tribe’s arguments against the use ofmathematics in court. Tribe argued that mathematics’ cold and precise naturefought against the human empathy needed in a good jury. He almost single-handedly halted the appearances of mathematical arguments at trials, untilprobabilities were necessarily re-introduced with the development of geneticanalysis.

The Case of Diana SylvesterIn 1972 in San Francisco, young nurse Diana Sylvester was raped and killed inher own flat. Her landlady saw the murderer as he fled and described him to thepolice, but despite following a few leads, they eventually had to close the case.

30 years later, following advances in genetic analysis, the SF police forcereceived a grant to re-open closed cases which contained DNA evidence. InDiana’s file there was a sample of semen found on her body. It was partiallydegraded and when analysed, showed only 5 pairs of peaks (called loci) out ofthe 13 present on full DNA graphs. When the sample was run against theCalifornia database of sex-offenders, a match came up – John Puckett, a very ill71-year-old local man.

When a DNA graph is incomplete, it can (as in this case), match another DNAprofile on all the loci that are present, but there is no way to know if it wouldalso match on the remaining loci – and a match between two profiles needs tobe exact for them to come from the same person (or identical twins). DegradedDNA profiles come with a Random Match Probability (RMP), representing theprobability that a person picked at random on the street would have a matchingprofile. The more visible loci there are, the smaller the RMP – and the RMP forall 13 loci is 1 in many trillion, which is why DNA profiles are consideredunique to each person.

The RMP for the degraded sample was 1 in 1.1 million. But Bicka Barlow,Puckett’s defence lawyer, thought that grave mistakes had been made whencalculating RMPs, indicating that the figure in Puckett’s case could in fact bemuch higher. Indeed, a study carried out in Arizona over a number of yearsshowed the following pairs of matching profiles on 9 loci (RMP 1 in 13 billion):

Database size Number of 9-loci matches found 10,000 1 60,000 90 65,000 122


Barlow’s mistake, as pointed out by the prosecution, was none other than the oneillustrated by the famous birthday problem. Calculating the probability offinding two matching birthdays in a room of people is very different from theprobability of one of them having a specific birthday, say, January 1st. In fact,the figures found in the Arizona study were close to what could be expected.

Barlow’s second argument was that in a database of 338,000 sex-offenders, withan RMP of 1 in 1.1 million, there was a 338,000/1.1 million = 1 in 3 chance offinding a match, indicating that the chance of the match being coincidental wasvery high. But, as was explained by the prosecution, there were many things toconsider here other than the DNA match. Puckett was a man, he was the rightage to have committed the murder, and he was shown to fit the landlady’sdescription. The correct probability to consider would be that of satisfying allthese criteria at once, as Puckett did.

Combining and measuring the importance of different pieces of evidence is avery difficult thing to do, especially when a seemingly damning DNA match isinvolved. But there is a mathematical formula, called Bayes’ theorem, whichlets us do exactly that.

The Case of Miss MAs Miss M was returning home from a night out with friends early in themorning of 6 April 1991 in London, she was attacked and raped by a man thatshe later described to the police as Caucasian, in his early twenties, with a localaccent. Forensic scientists were able to collect a good DNA sample of theattacker with an RMP of 1 in 200 million, but this wasn’t found to match anyoneon the sex offenders database until two years later when a new profile wasadded, belonging to a local man named Andrew Dean (not his actual name).

Dean’s DNA matched the attacker’s, but he was 37 years old rather than in histwenties and Miss M was unable to pick him out of a line-up. In addition, he hadan alibi provided by his girlfriend.

At Dean’s trial, the jury had to weigh two different types of evidence against oneanother: the scientific evidence pointing towards guilt, and the non-scientificevidence pointing towards innocence – exactly the type of problem which canbe solved using Bayes’ Theorem.

As an expert witness, the defence called a professor of statistics at the Universityof Oxford named Peter Donnelly, who tried to explain how to apply Bayes’theorem in the context of the trial. Peter Donnelly explained the theorem andhelped the jurors estimate the probabilities involved by giving them a detailedquestionnaire to fill in. He let them make their own assessment of theprobabilities, but he ran them through the process using his personal estimates,and reached a chance of 1 in 55 that Dean might be innocent. Thus Bayes’formula yielded an estimate of guilt that might not be considered as ‘beyondreasonable doubt’.

The jury voted to convict Dean and he appealed, but at his second trial wasconvicted again. This time, the judge’s report contained a statement strongly


condemning the use of Bayes’ theorem at the trial. “More fundamentally,however, the mathematical formula, applied to each separate piece of evidence,is simply inappropriate to the jury’s task. Jurors evaluate evidence and reach aconclusion not only by means of a formula, mathematical or otherwise, but bythe joint application of their individual common sense and knowledge of theworld to the evidence before them.”

In the UK, more than one judge has recommended the rejection of Bayes’theorem in court, but this means it is very difficult for jurors to properly assessthe importance of the evidence they are presented, especially DNA matcheswhich come with a significant scientific aura.

It is both important and urgent for the law professionals to reach an agreementon the best way to use and present mathematical arguments, as these, at themoment, achieve little but kick the door open for appeals. If we get it right,though, mathematical reasoning could be one of the jury’s most important toolsat any trial.

Coralie Colmez was raised in Paris and studied maths at Cambridge University.She recently co-authored Math on Trial: How Numbers Get Used and Abused inthe Courtroom with her mother, Leila Schneps.

NEW ADDITIONS TO THE HUMANIST LIBRARY, NOVEMBER 2013

Benn, Piers Ethics 1998Blackburn, Simon Ruling passions 2009Bushman, Richard Mormonism (VSI) 2008Critchley, Simon Infinitely demanding 2012DeGrazia, David Animal rights (VSI) 2002Diamond, Jared Collapse 2011Diamond, Jared Guns, germs and steel 2005Ellis, Lucy Oil paintings in public ownership in Camden Vol. II 2013Hurka, Thomas Drawing morals 2011Imison, Tamsyn Comprehensive achievements 2014Kneale, Matthew An atheist's history of belief 2013Myser, Catherine Bioethics around the globe 2011Priest, Graham Logic (VSI) 2000Schaha, Alom Young atheist's handbook 2012Strohm, Paul Conscience (VSI) 2011Sunstein, Cass Animal rights 2006van Wyhe, John A R Wallace: Letters from the Malay Archipelago 2013Wilkinson, T.M. Ethics and the acquisition of organs 2011

Cathy Broad, Librarian


If you have any suggestions for speakers or event ideas, or would like to convene a

Sunday afternoon informal, get in touch with Sid Rodrigues at

[email protected] or 020 7061 6744.

SCIENCE AND THE RISE OF ATHEISMRussell Blackford

Lecture to the Ethical Society, 10 November 2013

Many atheists find support for their views from the methodology, history, andfindings of science. In response, it is often suggested that, properly understood,religion and science are nonetheless “compatible” — whatever that actuallymeans. The ongoing debate is complex, but I argue that science really does tendto undermine religion and encourage atheistic understandings of the world.

Many people beg to differ. Religion/science accommodationism, the idea thatthere is adequate room for religion within a scientifically informedunderstanding of the world, has a long history and is currently very fashionable.Perhaps most famously, an accommodationist view was elaborated by StephenJay Gould in his 1999 book Rocks of Ages. Accommodationism even gainsendorsement from science organizations such as, in the United States ofAmerica, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the AmericanAssociation for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). By contrast, my take-home message is that it’s seriously misleading to deny, or to minimize, science’shistorical, psychological, and rational tendency to undermine religious belief.

No more NOMAIn developing his principle of Non-Overlapping Magisteria (or NOMA), Gouldargues that religion and science possess separate and non-overlapping“magisteria”, or domains of teaching authority, and so can never come intoconflict unless one or the other oversteps its legitimate domain. If we acceptGould’s principle, the magisterium of science relates to “the factual constructionof nature” (Gould 1999, 54); by contrast, so Gould asserts, religion has authorityin respect of “ultimate meaning and moral value” (p. 3) or “moral issues aboutthe value and meaning of life” (p. 55). Because they do not overlap, science andreligion cannot contradict each other, and hence can coexist in mutual respect.

On such an account, religion is invulnerable to scientific criticism, but only if werule out many religious claims as being illegitimate from the outset even asreligious claims. For example, Gould does not attack the fundamentalistChristian belief in a young earth merely on the basis that it is incorrect in thelight of well-established scientific knowledge. Instead, he argues that it isillegitimate in principle to have any religious beliefs about matters of empiricalfact. Unfortunately for Gould’s analysis, however, most actual religions have notconfined themselves in any such way.

It may be difficult to define positively what a religion is, but religions havetypically been somewhat encyclopedic explanatory systems. They usually comecomplete with ritual observances and standards of conduct prescribed forbelievers (and sometimes others as well), but historically they have been farmore than systems of ritual and morality. They make sense of the world and ofhuman experience in terms of an otherworldly realm and its workings. Theytypically posit a transcendent dimension to human life and well-being, and theydescribe transformative powers, such as the Abrahamic God, that can ensure ourattainment of otherworldly benefits (compare Taylor 2007, 15-20).


Religions frequently make statements about humanity’s place in the space-timeuniverse, as well as in relation to a transcendent and invisible reality, and itwould be naï ve and ahistorical to claim that this somehow lies outside theirlegitimate or essential role. There is, in fact, ample opportunity for the supposedmagisteria of religion and science to overlap and come into conflict.Furthermore, plenty of conflict actually takes place. So much for the principle ofNon-Overlapping Magisteria. No more NOMA! (For much more, see theextensive discussions of related issues in Blackford and Schuklenk 2013.)

Avoiding InconsistencyMany religious apologists and secular accommodationists argue for one oranother very weak thesis, i.e. that this or that finding by science does notlogically rule out the existence of God (or the truth of specific doctrines such asthe resurrection of Jesus, or the existence of an afterlife). I’m prepared toconcede this in a general way — at least for the sake of argument — but wheredoes it get us?

For example, it’s logically possible that both evolutionary theory and atraditional kind of monotheism are true… while also thinking that evolutionarytheory ought to make religion less plausible to a reasonable person. Indeed thecumulative effect of science over the past few centuries has been to makereligion far less plausible, and to make atheism far more plausible, to open-minded people with reasonable standards of evidence. In those circumstances, itis seriously misleading to talk about religion and science being “compatible”.

It is, of course, true that any particular system of religious belief can change overtime, by adapting to whatever scientists might discover. Thus any directcontradictions can be removed as they are identified. There is no clear limit tothe range of devices that can be utilized to ensure that a particular religion doesnot contradict whatever current science appears to have established. In the limit,almost all a religion’s stories and doctrines might be reinterpreted, over time, asmetaphors, moral exhortations, and the like.

Still, it’s an open question just how far any particular religion can adjust inpractice, and often, there will be considerable constraints. Depending on thecircumstances, the process of theological adjustment can involve resistance,disillusionment, splintering, and mutual anathemas. The system as a whole mayeventually come to look very different from its original form, and in the processit may lose much of what made it attractive to people in the first place.

But even this does not take us to the heart of the matter. Compared to religions,the sciences take a very different approach to explaining the world and our placein it. Susan Haack describes the sciences as a massive inter-generational effortat inquiry based on experience and reason. They call upon resources that arecontinuous with everyday empirical inquiry, although they utilize variousmethods to extend our senses, reduce confounding factors, and augment ourordinary reasoning powers. By contrast, the various religions, with theirrevelations, priesthoods, and holy books, explain the world and the humancondition in ways that are discontinuous with everyday inquiry (Haack 2007,esp. 266-267).


So you might say that there is a methodological incompatibility between scienceand religion (Coyne 2012). But here’s an even more important point. Inprinciple, a difference in methods between religion and science might not havemattered. It could have turned out that the methods of religion, or at least the truereligion, give the same results as science. Why didn’t they?

How Atheism Became ThinkablePrior to the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and (especially) seventeenthcenturies, human efforts had achieved very little understanding of the cosmosexcept on human scales. Our ancestors had no real understanding of very distantphenomena such as the sun, planets, and stars, very small phenomena such asDNA, or very ancient phenomena that existed before human records began.They did have many explanations of the world’s phenomena, usually involvingthe actions of otherworldly intelligences and forces. Nonetheless — quiteunderstandably — humanity’s quest for knowledge and understanding outpacedthe availability of relevant evidence and the development of methods foranalyzing it.

Consider Europe in the early sixteenth century, somewhat before the scientificrevolution. As Charles Taylor emphasizes in his monumental A Secular Age(2007), atheism was virtually unthinkable in the societies of Europe at that time.How did it become thinkable, even attractive?

Taylor emphasizes that there was no fully-developed non-religious alternativeavailable in, say, 1500. Moreover, there were three features of the social orderthat converged to make atheism so unthinkable. First, the natural world was seenas testifying to divine purpose and action. Second, the life of the kingdom as awhole, along with that of each of its constituent associations, was seen assomehow underpinned by God, with the functioning of all of these pervaded byritual and worship. Third, there was a strong sense of living in an enchantedcosmos, full of miraculous agents and powers (Taylor 2007, 25-28; compareBlackford and Schuklenk 2013, 192-193). Many factors may have contributedto the desacralizing of politics, and I won’t discuss those here. But theemergence and consolidation of science did at least three things to help breakreligion’s epistemic stranglehold:

(1) They contradicted some religious claims outright. (2) They providedalternative explanations of many events previously assigned to the will of God,and more generally they contributed to the development of naturalisticphilosophies. (3) They tended to disenchant the cosmos as more and morephenomena were explained naturalistically.

At the dawn of modern science, it might have turned out, for all anyone knew,that the most honest and rigorous investigation of the natural world wouldconfirm ideas that were already in the holy scriptures or church traditions. Thetrue religion might have been ahead of science if its founders had actuallyreceived knowledge from beings such as gods or angels. For example, the bestefforts of natural philosophers (the word “scientist” did not yet exist) might havediscovered that our planet is about 6,000 years old and that there was aworldwide flood some thousands of years ago.


For all anyone knew, science might have had a future in discovering all sorts ofamazing powers and agents playing a causal role in the world around us. Theremight have been a process, through history, by which claims about the worldmade by the correct religion were gradually confirmed in their essentials —perhaps with the addition of new details to the picture.

Unfortunately for religious apologists of various kinds, nothing like this provedto be the case. Instead, as more and more evidence was obtained about theworld’s actual structures, events, and causal mechanisms, the earlierexplanations from religion (or entangled with it) were gradually displaced —either rejected as inconsistent with the newer scientific ones or simply renderedirrelevant. As a process like this unfolds, science is discrediting and subvertingreligion. It is revealing religion as premature in its understanding of the world,as poorly evidenced by the emerging standards and as increasingly less thedefault position. As a consequence, religion’s claims to intellectual authorityhave become increasingly implausible to reasonable people. Yes, a body ofreligious beliefs can be modified over time to avoid direct logical inconsistencywith relevant scientific findings. But that is not enough for a meaningful“compatibility” of religion and science. Much more would be required forreligion and science to be compatible, or for science to pose religion no threat.

Science has done much to disenchant the world and to undermine the intellectualauthority of priests, prophets, religious traditions, holy books, and so on, thusreducing the motivation for religious belief and making atheism increasinglymore thinkable and plausible. Science has directly falsified some religiousexplanations of the natural order.

It has provided an alternative, if incomplete and provisional, picture of theworld, and it has made much of religion anomalous and/or irrelevant. Thankslargely to science it has become increasingly unlikely that we live in a worldwhere supernatural forces or entities play any explanatory role. The balance ofevidence over the past five centuries has turned decisively against religion andthe supernatural and in favour of atheism — and the consolidation and successof science have been crucial in this. We should not hesitate to say so.

ReferencesBlackford, Russell and Udo Schü klenk. 2013. 50 Great Myths About Atheism.Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.Coyne, Jerry A. 2012. “Science, Religion, and Society: The Problem of Evolution inAmerica.” Evolution 66: 2654–2663. Gould, Stephen Jay. 1999. Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness ofLife. New York: Ballantine.Haack, Susan. 2007. Defending Science — Within Reason: Between Scientism andCynicism. Amherst, NY: Prometheus.Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.

Russell Blackford is a Conjoint Lecturer at the University of Newcastle, NSW.His books include Freedom of Religion and the Secular State (2012), 50 GreatMyths About Atheism (2013; co-authored with Udo Schuklenk), and HumanityEnhanced: Genetic Choice and the Challenge for Liberal Democracies (2014).


HUMANISM FOR INQUIRING MINDS

by Barbara Smoker

Published by Conway Hall Ethical Society in 2013.

6th Edition, ISBN 978-0-902368-28-6. 80 pages £6.50 post free

Review by Christopher Tofallis

I was never introduced to humanism in the many years of my formal education,neither did my friends ever mention it. One wonders if this aspect of educationhas changed. There is a danger that in the quest for balance in teaching religionin schools, the ethical alternative to religion may be overlooked entirely. This iswhere this book comes into its own. In just eighty pages it covers a lot of groundand would be excellent for use in the classroom as a trigger for all sorts ofdiscussions.

After reading this book I expect that many will exclaim “I have been a humanistall my life and I never knew it!” The term ‘Humanism’ deserves more publicprominence given that it is so widespread – albeit in an unspoken way. Thesomewhat independent attitude of humanists may be the reason they often do notassociate with a formal organisation, and therefore remain the quiet majority inthe background. However, the author points out that gathering together offersmany advantages, not least of which is help with making decisions by discussionwith trusted people of a similar outlook. There is a chapter on living as ahumanist which provides pointers to relevant organisations.

The book takes a refreshingly common sense approach when appropriate:‘Philosophers tend to make extraordinarily heavy weather of quite simplematters. To most of us it is self-evident that it is better to experience pleasure andhappiness than pain and misery, and that kindness is therefore good and crueltybad.’ Nevertheless, the contributions of philosophers are strongly highlighted,particularly in the first two chapters on the origins of humanism.

Why We Should Be UnderstandingOne extremely important, but largely unappreciated, aspect of human life is that‘we are less free than we feel we are’. All events are caused by prior events andconditions according to the laws of nature (physics). Our brains determine ouractions and our brains are not immune from the laws of physics. This vitalrealisation has the valuable potential to make us more understanding of thebehaviour of other people. Thus tolerance for differing opinions is a key value,coupled with the understanding that everyone’s views are capable of beingchanged by discussion and evidence.

It occurred to me whilst preparing this piece that the lyrics to John Lennon’sImagine display a humanist attitude. The song begins by gently suggesting thatdiscarding thoughts of an after-life in heaven or hell, people would be able tolive more peacefully by focusing on the present. Religious fanatics who blowthemselves up along with others who happen to be nearby, are doing so in thebelief they will be rewarded in the next life for the ‘good’ they have done. Itseems that for those who believe in heaven this life cannot have the same value


as to non-believers. The likelihood that this is the only life we have makes it somuch more precious. The American humanist Robert Ingersoll put it this way:‘The time to be happy is now, the place to be happy is here, and the way to behappy is to make others so’.

If I have a suggestion for future editions of the book, it would be to includesomething on humanist ideas in literature and song. Although humanist attitudesabound in our culture, they are often not identified as such. The author of thebook, Barbara Smoker, wrote the first edition in 1973, and is now 90 years ofage. She has not only witnessed, but has also been involved with, many of thecampaigns that have led to changes in the law and society more generally. Herwriting has a style that makes it a pleasure to read, such that one can imaginepeople wanting to read the book again. For example, ‘To those who are used tothe ready-cooked meals of religious faith, humanism may seem to offer nothingat all. But it points to the ingredients for making your own meal to your owntaste’, thus expressing in an imaginative way the fact that humanists are free-thinkers. ‘Humanism stands for the open mind in an open society’.

All in all, this is a splendidly clear and down to earth introduction to humanism.There are chapters entitled ‘Reality – true and false’, ‘Values – good and bad’,and ‘Morals – right and wrong’. It presents the fundamental approaches ofrationality and evidence-seeking (especially scientific) as a way of acquiringknowledge about a world which follows laws of nature (as opposed tosupernatural explanations). Moreover, it stresses the fact that humanism is notjust a set of attitudes and a way of understanding the world, but involves actionbased on wanting to make the world a better place.

VIEWPOINTS

Comment on Global Modernity and other essays, by Tom Rubens An issue raised by this book of essays, and highlighted in Ben Basing’s reviewin the November issue of the Ethical Record, is equality of opportunity. This, heassured us, need not lead to equality of outcome. Some of us might be inclinedto respond, we should be so lucky. Historically the concept of equality ofopportunity is associated with social-democratic political parties, as it sits wellwith their strategy of extracting sufficient concessions from a capitalist economyto secure their electoral base and to buy off potential sources of discontent whilesimultaneously, most especially in times of economic crisis, giving the highestpriority to ensuring that capitalism can reproduce itself.

New Labour’s bail-out of failed banks at immense public expense – socialismfor the rich as it has derisively been called – is a case in point. Thus the soi-disant party of labour is also the party of a capitalist class which is inherentlyinegalitarian and which it has no intention of challenging, as a process ofcreating authentic political and economic equality would require.

The tactic of endorsing equality of opportunity and dismissing equality ofoutcome has, of course, spread to the whole of the political class, since theformer principle conveniently sidesteps tackling gross systemic inequalities. All


that it entails is adopting a vague target that can never be definitively attainedbut can be endlessly promised, for how much social churning is to count as itsrealisation? More importantly, however, neither can an inherently fuzzy process(perfect as a pseudo-goal) ever be conclusively shown to have failed, even in theworst of times. Even now, when social mobility has virtually ground to a halt, afew exceptionally talented, well-connected, lucky or ruthless individualscontinue to climb the social ladder into boardrooms and elite politics.

The Chaotic Patchwork of SchoolsEquality of opportunity is also a chimera because in Britain, with its chaoticpatchwork of private, public, faith-based, grammar, academy, grant maintained,voluntary schools and schools under local authority control, no serious attempthas ever been made to create an egalitarian school system. On the contrary,schools are at liberty to reinforce the inequalities that disfigure this society. Nopolitical party which was serious about equality could conceivably shirk the taskof either turning so-called ‘public’ fee-paying schools, where social privilege ishanded on, into comprehensives open to all comers, or else closing them down.Better resourcing state primary schools, as Tom Rubens favours, would hardlysuffice to ensure initial-position equality, especially as they are in competitionwith selective private fee-paying schools in which children are taught in small,relatively homogeneous classes.

Equality of opportunity is finally a chimera because, despite its name, it is not aroute to equality at all, but a way of legitimating and perpetuating inequality. Bymerely setting its sights on moving some individuals up the hierarchy, itinherently leaves the ladder of social and economic inequality intact. Therebysubsists a class-based society that endows those at its head (as indeed TomRubens acknowledges) with wholly excessive amounts of wealth, income,power and influence. Those at the bottom of society, on the other hand, are leftwith precious little of any of those things, along probably with the disablingconviction, nurtured by the political class the better to render them quiescent,that they deserve no better for not striving harder against overwhelming odds.

Michael McCarthy

The Genetic Modification DebateJay Ginn’s letter (ER Nov 2013:24) recalls the early years of this century, about2002, when feelings of unease about GM could not be justified by evidence, andgave rise to a campaign of untruths, half-truths, and irrelevances (aided byMonsanto’s inept media relations – facing polite hostility from a Guardiancolumnist, they did not invite the editor to discuss the matter over lunch, but senta gang of men to shout at him in his office).

World trade in agricultural seeds is indeed controlled by a few powerfulcorporations, but this cannot be blamed on GM, as it has been true since at leastforty years before GM was invented.

Poor farmers have been badly treated by moneylenders for at least a century, butthere is no evidence that corporations prevented poor farmers from collectingand using their own seeds. The story which so excited anti-GM campaigners wasa garbled version of a Canadian court case, Monsanto Canada Inc. v. Schmeiser,


in which a (prosperous) farmer claimed that the lorry-loads of patent“RoundupReady” oilseed rape, grown on his farm, were not covered by thepatent.

Monocultures certainly cause loss of biodiversity and sustainability, but GM isnot the cause. In 1845, nearly all Irish potato growers planted the high-yieldingLumper variety, which was infested by an adapted strain of blight fungus,causing the great famine. The most successful world seed producer is Pioneer,founded in 1924 (and sold as a going concern to DuPont in 1999). It does notuse GM, but uses selection and hybridisation to produce F1 hybrid seeds, whichgrowers must buy new every year. Monsanto’s Roundup and RoundupReady areregistered trademarks, but the invention itself is only protected by patents, whichwill expire in 2014.

Varieties which are larger because they contain more water, for instancebeefsteak tomatoes, are produced by old-fashioned selective breeding.

Donald Rooum – London

AtheismIn his article (ER November) analysing strong and weak atheism, Graham Bellfollows the usual premiss that the range of atheistic strength or weakness residesin the disbeliever, whereas I contend that it is the type of god in question whichdemands this variation in strength of disbelief and determines the burden ofproof.

I myself am certainly a strong atheist vis-à -vis the Abrahamic god, sincesuffering in the world logically precludes belief in a creator that issimultaneously both all-powerful and all-loving; whereas I am a weak atheistwith regard to putative gods without those attributes, especially the non-intervening Deistic sort of god.

The Abrahamic creator’s self-contradiction is on a line with that of a squarecircle, regarding which the person who alleges the obviously impossible mustbear the entire burden of proof.

Barbara Smoker – Bromley

Smoker’s ‘Evidism’Having known Barbara Smoker for 50 years and been a great admirer of hermany qualities, which have always included a firm grasp of good plain English,I know she is pulling our collective legs with her suggestion that we callourselves ‘Evidists’, on the basis that this would be ‘readily understood’. Tellthat to the man in the street.

Please, let’s stick with Humanist with a capital H and no prefix. I do believe thatour definition, and the claim of our definition for that word, is now becominggenerally accepted.

Don Langdown – Orpington, Kent


The views expressed in this Journal are not necessarily those of the Society.

DANGEROUS LIAISONS: THE CLASH BETWEEN ISLAMISM AND ZIONISM

by Rumy HasanNew Generation Publishing (2013). ISBN-10: 1909593141

Review by Mazin Zeki

Students of Christopher Hill will recall his magisterial analysis of the way thatpolitical projects often used religious iconography. This in itself led to thebeginnings of secularism particularly in France. Rumy Hasan compares andcontrasts the common themes of Zionism and Islamism, both late nineteenthcentury phenomena formed in the turmoil of a declining Ottoman Empire. Ifthere is a common root it is likely to have been Italian political theory. AlAfghani, the progenitor of the Islamic revival, and Herzl were influenced bythis.

All such fundamentalist ideologies contain disguised modernist andhomogenising tendencies which may have nothing to do with religion, whichcontains internal diversity and may internally oppose such changes. Bothideologies claim to speak on behalf of all co-religionists. It is falsely assumedthat all Jews are Zionist or support Israel. Similarly it is assumed that allMuslims have a single ideological or theological viewpoint. Another similarityis that both ideologies are separate from concepts of state but invoke an inventedworldwide brotherhood based on an alleged shared identity.

The clash in the Western metropolitan countries is the result of Muslim inwardmigration since the war and the creation of diasporic ‘imagined communities’noted by Benedict Anderson. But the issue of Palestine is not just symbolicbecause it is a case of a people whose rights have been forcibly denied. Both thePalestine cause and Zionism, which were broadly secular, are now dominated byreligious elements.

Such political projects highlight what many secularists are incapable ofunderstanding or tackling: the growing use of religion, not as faith, but as anexpression of identity. It is this focus on identity and politicised demands basedon it, which is the cause of current and future conflict.

Zionism grew as a response to antisemitism in Europe. Islamism sprang from thedisappointments of an imitative nationalism which, after ostensiblyoverthrowing colonial rule achieved a series of rentier states enjoying onlypseudo-independence under the rule of benighted dependent elites. Interestingly,both ideologies are heavily dependent on overseas support both direct anddiasporic. Rumy Hasan has highlighted the importance of this clash in the Westand the deep but evasive symbolism that both sides draw on.


CHES’s SUNDAY CONCERTS, WINTER 2013Artistic Director: Simon Callaghan

Doors open at 1730 Concerts start at 1830 Tickets £9; students £4; under 16 freeFull details on: www.conwayhallsundayconcerts.org.uk

ONE DEATH ON THE SOMME

The Somme was not one single battle in the First War but a series of battles,minor engagements and unnamed skirmishes, starting on 1st July 1916, theinfamous First Day, and not ending until 18th November 1916. Millions diedon the Somme – we must not forget to include the German casualties also – andmany more were damaged, wounded and handicapped. So much, so wellknown.

My great uncle, Leonard Jeynes was one of the deaths. My Grandma first toldme this when I was quite small and whenever she mentioned Leonard’s name hereyes became very sad. ‘Leonard was lovely,’ she would always add.

I only knew these basic details recently. We now have access to the files of theCWGC (Commonwealth War Graves Commission) on line and various othersources of information. I could not help feeling annoyed – the whole subject ofthe pointless First War deaths makes me very angry if I am not careful – by theirony of the impressive efficiency of the ‘search’ function on CWGC finding thenames of the volunteers who had been sent off so callously and carelessly to die,immediately.

The ruins of Albert, a small town 28 kms north-east of Amiens, in Picardy, Franceafter the German bombardment of the first battle of Albert. It now hosts the SommeTrench Museum in a 1st world war trench. German and British trenches aredisplayed. There is a severe disparity in trench quality – first class the German,third class the British. No wonder the German troops were able to retreat to theirtrenches relatively unscathed even after days of British attack.

The Museum is under the famous cathedral of Albert. On top of the Basilica was awell-known statue known as the ‘golden virgin’. It was believed that no harm couldcome to the town while she was ‘protecting’ it.


The Hull ‘Pals’The family was comparatively small, just two boys. I think their father diedquite early. I worked out that Leonard was 20 odd when he died and Leonard’selder brother, Charlie married Grandma in 1912; my mother followed 18 monthslater. The Jeynes family lived in Hull (where I was born) so Leonard was a Hull‘Pal’. Most of the Northern towns who sent volunteers called them ‘Pals’.Leonard was a Lance-Corporal in the 10th Battalion of the East YorkshireRegiment. I bought a book on the Hull Pals, the 10-13th battalions of the EastYorkshire Regiment and only the other day found the final irony of this tale.

The book includes a list of what the various Pals did on the battlefield and whenmen were killed. Grandma was told Leonard was shot by a sniper while cleaninghis rifle. I realised there was a gap of one day before and after the day he waskilled – 3rd August 1916.

There had been no fighting recorded for the 2nd, 3rd and 4th of August and hiswas the only death on these days. Clearly not ‘k/a’ (killed in action) as stated inmilitary records. I now understand what had happened. Sad and pointless, oneof so many.

Jennifer R Jeynes {I adopted the surname Jeynes in memory of Leonard and it was pleasing tonote the alliteration.}

Jennifer R Jeynes standing bythe gravestone of her great-uncle Lance-Corporal LeonardJeynes, a Hull ‘pal’, in St vaastMilitary Cemetery atRichebourg l’Avoué nearBéthune, Pas de Calais.

There are 744 British graves,including one man shot at dawnfor (alleged) desertion, 55Indian (called Mohammedan)and 91 German. It wasnoticeable that only basicdetails appeared on the EastYorkshire graves – those ofother regiments usually includea quotation or proverb at thebottom.

This cemetery is well awayfrom the main battlefield of theSomme – the Pals missed theslaughter of the terrible firstday, 1st July, but were used in a‘distraction’ manoeuvre which,of course, was no less deadly,at the beginning of August1916.


Published by the Conway Hall Ethical Society, 25 Red Lion Square, WC1R 4RLPrinted by J.G. Bryson (Printer). 156-162 High Road, London N2 9AS. ISSN 0014 - 1690

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CHES SPECIAL GENERAL MEETING, 10 NOVEMBER 2013

At this meeting, two motions were passed, summarised below:

1. A new rule 28 in three parts was added to Part XIII of the Society’s rulesto facilitate the dissolution of the Society:-Part (1) “If, in the opinion of the Committee {the General Committee [Ed]},the work of the Society may be better or more efficiently carried on by theSociety transferring its assets to another charity with identical or similarpurposes, a resolution may be proposed to the members for the dissolution ofthe Society;”Part (2) referred to a two-thirds majority for this being required at an SGM;Part (3) “Subject to payment of its debts the net assets of the Society shall betransferred upon dissolution to another registered charity …. or in the absenceof such direction [passed under rule 28(1)] as determined by the Committee.”

2. In accordance with rule 28…in order to become a Charitable IncorporatedOrganisation of the Association type, the Society shall be dissolved on a dateto be determined by the Committee…. The Committee is granted authority totake all necessary steps to perfect such transfer without further recourse to the

members.

THE HUMANIST LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES

The Humanist Library and Archives are open for members and researchers onSundays to Thursdays from 1000 - 1700. Please inform the Librarian,

Catherine Broad, of your intention to visit. The Library has an extensive collection of new and historic freethought material.

When evening courses are running, the Library will remain open on selectedevenings. These will be advertised on the website.

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