Choice and sexuality

I saw a post on Facebook this morning by a religious bigot arguing that homosexuality is a choice of lifestyle. A moment's reflection is all that is required to see the falsity of this view. Since it is one of those posts that I cannot comment on I'll use my blog to do so instead.

The basic point is simple, one we can all recognise by simply looking at ourselves and our preferences for a moment or two. No-one chooses what they like, no-one has any control over what they are attracted to. I used to prefer red wine. These days, probably for biological reasons connected with my taking Allopurinol for a long period, I tend to prefer white. The reds I do still like, are, annoyingly, very expensive. At that point, but not before, I seem to have a choice. I look at my financial circumstances and decide I'd better do without the very expensive reds, and since I mostly don't like the cheaper ones any more, I buy a bottle of white that I do like. It used (before I was taking Allopurinol) to be the other way round – the only whites I liked were the expensive wines of Chablis, but I was happy to settle for an inexpensive Claret. I have absolutely no control over this – I put the wine in my mouth, and I either like it or I don't.

That is the way human beings are. I happen to be interested in the Hellenistic philosophers, but my friend finds them boring and loves to rebuild valve radios. These hold no interest for me, even though I can appreciate the beauty of his finished work and the skill involved. I'd no more want to do that than swim with a school of sharks. But there are people who do enjoy swimming with sharks.

One of my friends is distressed by the mere thought of eating meat, another finds a vegetarian diet repulsive. Neither of these is a choice. My vegetarian friend cannot help her reaction to meat. I am utterly infuriated by the junk on TV called the Jeremy Kyle Show. I happen to know someone who finds it interesting, attractive, good entertainment and a perfect way to relax after a stressful day. While both of us may rationalise what we call our choices, in neither case is it a choice – we have no control over whether we like it or not, any more than we can choose whether we love or hate celery or garlic.

You like to wear red, I prefer greens and browns. Even if I think you look great in red the idea of wearing it myself is, well, unthinkable. You may say that you choose red, but it's a loose use of language – you find red attractive to wear and have no control over that at all. In exactly the same way I can choose whether I will visit Rome or Athens – but that I want to visit both of these cities is not a choice. I can rationalise why I want to visit them and do not want to visit Washington or Delhi, but there is no choice involved, it's a want I happen to have, connected to the interest in the Hellenistic Philosophers that I also happen to have. I can choose to stop reading their writings (at least I think I can, but I might get withdrawal symptoms if I do) but I cannot choose whether or not I am interested.

And in exactly the same way, none of us choose to whom we are sexually attracted. You might ask your father why he chose your mother, and he may give you cogent reasons – her cooking, her laugh, her eyes. But the real reason is that he found himself to be attracted to her, a fact of life over which he had no control whatever. He might have been able to choose whether or not he acted on that attraction, but he could not choose whether he was attracted or not. Equally we do not choose the gender of the person to whom we are sexually attracted. My friend Fred is bisexual – but he is not attracted to all men, or all women. He finds some men and some women attractive and is currently in a relationship with a particular individual. This happens to be someone of the opposite sex, but over the years I have known Fred he has also had long term and committed relationships with people of the same sex. From my point of view, I like Fred a lot, he is very good company, and I am delighted he is happy and in love. Some of his partners over the long time I have known him I have liked and got on with more than others, irrespective of their sex. Just as in the rest of life there are people that I like more, and people that I like less. I choose to spend time with the former rather than the latter, but which ones I like is beyond my control. I cannot choose whether I like someone any more than Fred can choose whether or not he is attracted to them.

To assert that someone's sexuality is a choice is about as ignorant a thing as I can imagine, because to see that the truth is otherwise is simply a matter of a moment's reflection about oneself.

What's getting at me?

It's easy really. I still can't quite forgive myself for a bum decision made when I was a theology student. Many of those that know me will have heard the story. In its bones it goes thus: the Principal took me aside, casually during a coffee break, and told me that he didn't think I was cut out to be a clergyman, but that I would make a good academic. And he had an opening for me. I simply wasn't interested. But he was right on the first point and may have been right on the second. I like to think so.

I know enough about the kind of job he had in mind for me to think that it might have led me away from theology into philosophy. At the time I was interested in St John's Gospel – there are some questions about its date and the background it arises from. And the person I was dating at the time knew the greatest authority on St John, Charles Kingsley Barrett, at Durham. So the dream goes that I might have gone to Durham to be supervised by Barrett in a study of St John's background. That, unavoidably, would have taken me deep into the philosophy of the Greco-Roman world that so interests me 40 years later. There are connected questions of liberty and democracy that are also a big interest of mine, so who knows where that might have led. And instead of that I was not much good as a clergyman, far too interested in the meaning of things to be any use at all in an average parish. I was seen as a threat by a lot of the clergy I worked with because I believed in educating the parishioners. I had to get to 65 before I found room to explore my academic talents and realise how much catching up there is to do. I did at least spend 20 years doing some sort of teaching, but it was of computing skills, and not anything to do with those questions of meaning that have bugged me for as long as I can remember.

An aside: I set up a group when I was a curate in Kingston to criticise my sermons. One comment made was that they were very educated and sometimes not too hard to follow, but what people really wanted was answers to questions to save them thinking for themselves. I was making them think for themselves, so I had it the wrong way round. An absolutely correct assessment of the situation!

In my mind I have revisited that coffee break several times. It is hard to see how the person I was then could have acted any differently. I'd had dreams of becoming a clergyman and studying theology since I was a child. I had the mistaken idea that people interested in religion were interested in it the same way I was – an exploration of meaning. I was on a track towards becoming a leader in that search. Only the search didn't actually exist in Church of England parishes, or anywhere much else apart from the dreaming spires of academe and in my head. None the less, that was the track I was on, I had got a long way down it after many years of trying, and I cannot see how I could have been deflected by a casual remark over coffee. And certainly not by Gerald – he taught New Testament, and by my 3rd year I had realised how much more about the New Testament I knew than he did. So he had the odds against him for changing my mind about anything. I won a University prize and was presented to the Queen Mum as a result, and Gerald had expressed surprise. “I knew you were good Oliver, but I didn't know you were that good.” And he called me Oliver, which everyone knew I hated. No, he hadn't impressed me, so how could he influence me?

Maybe there was a way. I was devoted to one of the teaching staff, Dr Cecilia Goodenough, who had supervised my prize-winning effort. I had total respect for her. She was indeed formidable. Nothing crossed her lips that she hadn't thought about long and hard. If she was convinced about a matter she said so. If there was doubt she explained the issues. Indeed, “issues” may have been the word she used most often.

Maybe Cecilia could have influenced me. In fact, even in a matter to which I was dedicated, she could at least have made me stop and think. But that never happened, and if it had done then the outcome might have been the same. I did wonder why Cecilia, who didn't believe in ordination, was training ordinands. But the point was that she too was engaged in a journey into truth and meaning which she couldn't let go.

I thought I had seen all this long ago. What else could have happened? So I thought I had forgiven myself. But I haven't. It is still irritating me like an itch I cannot scratch, a dull ache that will not go away. I can't get away from the thought that I had talent and a chance, and, in this one and only go I have at life, I wasted one and missed the other.

It is time to go back to the Stoics who had a unique and admirable understanding of ethical life in a deterministic world. Perhaps a short trip to Athens is called for to walk where Chrysippus walked, or to Rome to stand where Seneca stood and enjoy the view, especially as I have never been to either.

Midsummer Memory

Some years ago, on 22 June, I was travelling in to work by train and reading The Times and came across a photo of the previous day's celebrations at Stonehenge. At the time I was interested in ritual (I still think that ritual is an important part of life too easily neglected) and I wondered if the Druids simply expressed in their ritual of Father Sun and Mother Earth something self-evident (that we depend on the Sun and the Earth) or whether they hypostatised them as deities as primitive man once did.

I tend to follow up on ideas and questions, and that led me to getting to know a prominent Druid, a lady of great personality and much style. After a long email exchange we met, I joined in some festivities at Stonehenge and other sites and wrote some pieces for one of the Druid magazines. The ritual at Stonehenge at midwinter, in the cold and dark among the standing stones, under a brilliant starry sky, was especially moving.

What I learned surprised, and later shocked me. The answer to my first question was a clear yes - and I found it surprising that so many people could regard our celestial neighbours as gods when the physics is available for all to know. They just ignored it. I am always slightly nonplussed by people who opt to ignore the discoveries of science. But it happens. Creationism depends on it, for example. In that case a powerful emotional commitment outweighs scientific knowledge. The most dramatic example of that I ever came across was an Astrophysicist I knew once who was also a believer in the biblical account of creation. For her, biblical authority was more important, carried more of an emotional investment, even than her vast knowledge of how the universe actually works. So if someone like that can be effected in that way, then I suppose I should not be surprised when others who are less well informed fall under the same spell.

But there was more. The ritual evoked the spirits of the four directions, and of the ancestors, and while the former seemed nebulous and mysterious (but somehow powerful) the latter were quite simply the dead still living in some other parallel life, walking about, clothed as normal (but normal for a Druid may not be what is normal for most of us) who could be called upon in various ways. Apart from the rather strange idea of bodiless spirits wearing ghostly clothes, which seemed just silly, and the breach of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, it was the seriousness with which all this was taken that most bothered me.

Finally, over a meal, my Druid friend revealed that she was a shape-shifter. I am in no doubt that this woman, to all appearances elegant, charming, and sane, really believed that she could go into the woods at night and adopt the shape of, say, a fox or an owl. Those that know me will not expect me to take that without comment. As politely as I could I said I thought that was crazy and completely unbelievable. The conversation moved on, the meal ended, we parted on good terms and I never saw or spoke to her again.

Unhappily the lady I was then married to was not so skeptical as I - she remained in touch with the Druid lady and consulted her about some issues in her life. She was persuaded to have Past Life Regression Therapy - in which the troubles of the present are understood and healed by discovering what lives the person had lived before. The actual treatment was never discussed, but I did gather that my wife had learned that in a past life she had been a deer. She, an educated person, a talented therapist employed by the NHS, took this on board. In retrospect it is not a surprise that her mental health deteriorated rapidly soon after.

A little integrity...

Someone in a group I belong to has sparked an awareness in me. It begins with one of the first non-religious funerals I took. The deceased man's son wrote a poem which I read at the funeral. It was very good, very good indeed. He put his finger on some important things, and he said things about his Dad that everyone knew but only he had a right to say. After I read it the congregation spontaneously applauded.

The premise of the poem was that his father was sitting on a heavenly bar stool looking down on his family and they'd all meet again in the next life. And this was a funeral without religion. When we were being trained for this role the question came up of how we'd react if we were asked to say a prayer, or in some similar way contradict our personal atheism. I had worked out a compromise, but I never needed to use it. What did come up, and frequently, was my client's expectation of another life where the family would be reunited. That I had not expected.

In the case of the poem above this crops up in the premise of the poem - but the poem was so good, and it was so hard to see how it could have been written any other way, I just put it down as a necessary literary device. Later on there was no such excuse. Families would say something about meeting again, or the next life, almost in the same breath as declaring their rejection of all religion and disbelief in God. I'd smile and say nothing, it seeming wrong to me to disturb grieving people or deprive them of their comforts.

Often a member of the family or close friend would speak at the funeral, and almost invariably they would make a similar reference, either to meeting again or to the deceased looking down on us now. Well, it wasn't me saying it, but I did feel I was being associated with it, with something that seems quite wrong to me.

Every living thing on this planet dies. Its body is recycled one way or another. Nature is cavalier about death - vast numbers of different life forms produce more young than can possibly survive, and the vast majority become food for some other life form. As far as we can tell, Homo sapiens is no different. Our thinking self-awareness is totally dependent on the electro-chemical activity of our brains, just as it is for every other animal. When our brains stop, we stop, and we cease to exist, just as we did not exist for the 13.7 billion years the Universe has existed till now. There is absolutely no evidence of anything else. That is the way of all flesh, and all plants, and all microbes too. Stars are recycled in the same way. The only reasons we can have for believing in another life are comfort at the death of a loved one and the impossibility of imagining our own non-existence. None the less, it seems to me that the vast majority of people cling to that belief, including a majority of those who claim no religious adherence and no belief in God.

Quietly going along with what seems to me to be self-deception, maybe out of kindness, was an irritant to me. Now I do not take funerals any more I no longer need to be dishonest, and I can choose when I want to challenge the fantasies some people have. I general I don't do it, but I am free to, and sometimes I do.

Book recommendation

I just finished reading God Collar by Marcus Brigstocke, who is best known for being a comedian. It's a long time since I read a book and immediately started it again with a highlighter in my hand, but that's the case here. It's witty, in some places eye-wateringly funny, poignant, moving, honest, devastating in its even-handed criticism of religion and not pulling punches about the failings of the non-religious either. He bares what I can only call his soul in a very courageous way. The sheer humanity touched me. If anyone thinks non-religion is easy, a simple rational choice, here is something they need to read.

Just a quickie...

Neither books nor august persons are infallible authorities. All they offer are opinions, more or less well informed, more or less valuable, but nothing set in stone. Every opinion can be questioned, no matter how great the prestige of the person making the pronouncement. Indeed, my experience is that the best experts welcome intelligent questions and respond courteously. In the search for truth there is no question that is forbidden and no hard question that may be ducked.

Criticism of Religion

The other day I was struck by a cartoon on Facebook lampooning Christian doctrine. It was witty, I liked it, but the picture of the faith that it started from was hopelessly wrong. I tried to frame a response along the lines of it being necessary to understand your opponent and attack his real weak points. But time and space were short, I probably did not express myself well and I doubt I was understood.

So let's come at it from a less contentious starting point. One of the things that gets my goat these days is the misuse of statistics. From what I read by people in a position to know, the human race is incredibly bad at assessing risk. Advertisers, campaigners and others with an axe to grind can take advantage of this by manipulating statistics to make their sophistical point, and most of us fall for it over and over again. I feel the urge to correct such misuses as I see. There is only one problem: I am no statistician. Mathematics is to me as Ancient Greek is to most people. I have a friend who is a mathematician, who is comfortingly normal in other ways. But a few sentences with him quickly reveals the vast empty space in my understanding where maths ought to be. At work, some of my friends were Actuaries, people incredibly knowledgeable about risk and probability, and most of them were normal in other ways. One had a gift for putting such things into easy language liberally peppered with great, simple, examples, littered with humour. But I see these people no more. Instead I rely on things like More Or Less on Radio 4 to let me know when something less than statistically reliable is being promoted and to help me understand why there is a problem and why I should think twice.

There was quite a good example recently – there was something in the news about there being more people alive now than have ever lived. The point that was being made was about the present population explosion. More Or Less did a programme on it, which you can still download as a podcast. There are some assumptions to be made (where do you start counting people, for example – Homo sapiens only, or do H neanderthalis or H floriensis or H habilis get in too?) And there being no records till quite recently there are other problems to solve. While the adult population might be something that can be agreed on, what about the high proportion of infant deaths? They surely have to be counted as people who lived, if only briefly. Some American experts on population statistics went to work on it and it turns out that for everyone living now there are about 30 human persons who have died, taking the starting point as the rise of modern man 50,000 years ago. So the original statement, used to promote alarm, is simply rubbish.

I am aware of my mathematical incompetence. So when I suspect the presence of an odoriferous rodent I do not rush into print, I do some research. Then, armed with the facts, I can go to war against a real opponent. Sadly, although almost all of the people I know are aware of at least some, and sometimes significant, mathematical shortcomings, most of us think we can assess risk correctly. But we can't, we get it terribly wrong, and the blind are led into a ditch. A further example comes from a course I was on recently where we were asked to assess which class of road produces the greatest number of fatal accidents, motorways, urban roads, or rural roads. One of the group was a professional driver, whose considered opinion was that the only possible answer was motorways. The rest of us deferred to his judgement, which seemed reasonable enough. We were wrong. Motorways are far and away the safest roads with the lowest number of fatalities. It's urban roads, where pedestrians come into direct conflict with cars, that are markedly the worst for fatalities.

The point I am making here is that there are three factors to consider: expert knowledge, awareness of ignorance, and false confidence. It seems to me (I have no reliable statistics, but I do have quite a few examples from recent years experience) false confidence is common among those who are critical of religion. They often think they have grasped what the subject is about, but they have not, and go tilting at windmills. Sometimes they manage to do this in such a way that they bring ridicule on their own heads. At other times the misunderstanding is so crude and the attack so violent that religious persons who might otherwise be supportive of the point being made feel compelled to go to the aid of those under attack. Crude and inaccurate attacks are frequently self-defeating, in this subject as in others.

Alain de Botton, in his book Religion For Atheists, says “Tough-minded critics of religion have found much pleasure in laying bare the idiocy of believers in remorseless detail, finishing only when they felt they had shown up their enemies as thorough-going simpletons or maniacs”. (I'm working on the book at the moment and generally find most of his arguments unsatisfactory, but this comment seems well aimed.) No doubt there are believers who qualify under both those headings, but I have found most to be reasonable, good-natured people. Insulting them is not the way to make progress. What seems to me to be happening is that some of religion's critics are more interested in that feeling of triumph which Alain de Botton describes than anything else. I happen to think that religion is an emotional response at bottom, not an intellectual one. But rational argument, grounded in the realities of belief, not a caricature of it, might make some progress in undermining that emotional commitment, if that is desirable. Rational argument has nothing to do with the erection of an Aunt Sally or a Straw Man to shy at, nor with ad hominem attacks, but with reasoned criticism of the opponent's actual views, his real arguments, not ones we imagine he might have expressed.

In the same book I quoted above, Alain de Botton writes that “The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true” (emphasis in the original). I too find that question boring. Religion is evidently a human creation, but one which satisfies some human needs – that's the only reason it survives. How and why it does that are the proper subjects of academic study, by Social Scientists, Philosophers, Psychologists and so on. The important question concerning religion is how do we take the discussion forward from there?

Each of us will be grabbed by different things. Writing just for myself, here are some issues involving religion that motivate me strongly.

1. I am in favour of education, of the development of curiosity and understanding, especially but not solely in the young. And education must include the achievements of science, and indeed criticism of science, because that is that way that scientific progress is made. What must be resisted is the replacement of science with myth, and the silencing of questioning. That is what is happening in the expansion of the teaching of Creationism in schools as a valid alternative to Evolution. All such things should be resisted, if only because they substitute unquestionable dogma for a proper search for the truth.

2. Like most people I am horrified both by the extent of child abuse by the clergy, and by the cover-up by church authorities. Both the perpetrators and all (whatever rank and prominence they have since attained) those who protected them should be prosecuted by the appropriate jurisdiction and steps taken to ensure that such a thing can never happen again.

3. I am politically a liberal in the style and tradition of John Stuart Mill. Properly representative government is therefore close to my heart. At present we have a House of Lords that is subject to reform. And about time too. Some are arguing that Church of England Bishops should retain their seats in the Lords as of right. No-one should have a right to sit in government, in any role whatsoever. Every government official, especially members of both the houses of our legislature, should be elected. If a Bishop campaigns and gets elected, that's fine by me. But he (or she) should not have a seat by any other means, and nor should anyone else. 

4. There is an increasing (I think, I don't have access to any research to show it) number of believers in forms of religion that trade on people's fears of spirits, devils, and the like. We have just seen the termination of a trial, and the conviction of two of a child's family, who murdered him because of their belief that he was a witch. Such beliefs come straight from the Stone Age. What is to be done about their prevalence defeats me. It's very worrying.

5. Some forms of religion are extremely sexist – in India (those dreaded statistics seem to show) there is a large gap between the expected number of female births and the actual number. The implication is that female children are being killed. We have all heard of Honour Killings where a female family member has, for behaviour fully acceptable to the majority in our society, been murdered other family members. Cases have come to court which seem to be the tip of an iceberg. But this is not limited to people from India – and some have suggested that it is a cultural, not a religious, problem. I cannot judge. But I have heard people in good standing as spokesmen for a number of religions (Christianity included) denigrating women in general and denying them equal standing with men, in defiance of UK law. How best to resist this is not clear to me, but it must be resisted and reversed.

6. The idea has gained credence that “Faith” should be protected and respected. For myself, I don't care what people believe. I'm happy to allow them to take up Bertrand Russell's suggestion and believe that there is a china teapot in orbit round the moon. I absolutely respect everyone's right to believe whatever they want. I do NOT thereby respect the beliefs themselves. Some beliefs I do not share are arguable. I happen to think that it is frequently possible to make a strong case on both sides of a question. Some beliefs are ridiculous, like the china teapot example. Someone I know has fun by propagating one such and is an ordained minister in the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Most religious beliefs seem to me to either be short of evidence or to fly in the face of what evidence there is. There is a world of difference between respecting the right to believe and respecting the belief itself. I do not respect nonsense no matter who believes it, and nor should anyone else.

I could go on, but I won't. There are tremendous issues raised by religion in a wide variety of areas. They need to be considered carefully, and where necessary challenged rationally, but challenged for what they are, not for what they are not.

In two areas (at least) I have reservations. Some like to claim that religion has done terrible harm through suppression of the truth, violence and war. They have a strong case. But exactly the same crimes have been committed by non-believers. This is shaky ground to start an argument on.

Christian doctrine (the only one I am competent to talk about) is extremely complex. It might be hard to find two believers with exactly the same doctrinal stance. At the simplistic end their dogma is usually evidently self-contradictory, but at the other end, there is a mire. I suspect much the same is true of most of the major religions. Similarly it is easy to lampoon the bible which contains many things that fall under the headings of barbarism, self-contradiction, or meaninglessness. But anyone with a more than a nodding acquaintance with the text will know that things are not as they seem on the surface. You might be able to tie a fundamentalist in knots, but the vast majority are not in that camp, so I am reluctant to go there. It is fun to ask a Jehovah's Witness in, get out my Greek text, and embarrass them with the issues between it and the Authorised Version. But it is largely also a pointless waste of time. Often they don't understand the argument anyway.

I hope that in the foregoing I have made a clearer statement of the position I tried to make in brief on Facebook. In short, I am concerned about the false confidence exhibited by some of my fellow critics of religion who I think sometimes undermine our cause. But I think that religion does raise some important issues for our 21st Century democracy which need to be faced head on with properly thought out rational argument that deals effectively with the arguments put forward by the other side.