Some religious, and specifically Christian, commentators are indignant that the money from the Atheist bus campaign has been rolled over to support another poster drive which raises questions about the religious identity of children in the context of faith schools.

Why should they care how Humanists spend their money? Usually it’s the other way around. Humanists are deeply unhappy that Christians get their proselytism funded through tax relief on charitable donations.

The reason is that when the original poster campaign was launched, some Christians thought it would be a clever move to make a very public donation to the campaign. Reminiscent of the story Jesus told (the ‘widow’s mite’) about the arrogant religious leaders who made gifts for all to see, they then tipped off the media about what they had done.

Let no one be under any illusions about what was behind the move. The main aim was to take the wind out of Humanist sails. The donations were made in order to try and score a goal in the Match of the Day between religion and atheism.

See, you might be thinking: ‘this argument can’t possibly be going where I think it’s going, can it?’. And you’d be wrong:

Whether Humanists are right to use money, given by Christians for point-scoring reasons, for a poster campaign that highlights [problems with faith schools] is certainly debatable.

That’s inspired.

The other message of the article is a lot more humanist-friendly, and asks whether Jesus would have approved of faith schools discriminating against other faiths (or non-faiths). Which is a good point, from a religious perspective, although still misses the message of the posters: they’re about the problems of labelling children, and aren’t anti faith-school. The BHA’s anti faith-school campaign is being run in conjunction, but they’re not the same thing.

Times and Telegraph: HAHAHAHAHA those children are Christians! lol you lose.

BHA: …

A monster called Joseph Kony has for twenty years been kidnapping children, enslaving them in a child army and generally subjecting them to unspeakable atrocities, while the Ugandan government fails to do anything about it. The UK and US know what’s happening, but support said government’s spectacular failures, while the major aid agencies are remarkably ineffectual. The ‘good guys’ are raking in aid money, while the very bad guys raid schools – undefended despite foreknowledge and pleas from the staff - and take children to be raped/murdered and generally never seen again – unless you’re a nun with the balls to walk into the jungle and get them back. ‘Nightmare’ is an insufficient word.

She reveals a shocking story, and meets the blackest of situations with the blackest of humour, with Hollywood comparisons and plenty of self-deprecating commentary as she tries to figure out the intricacies of the politics, economics and general moral failings. It moves quickly and eloquently through her investigations and, ever so slowly, the story stops being about her. Hollywood recedes, the details of the situation are fleshed out, and you realise your initial impressions were wrong.

By the end the real spirit of the book becomes clear. Ms Bussmann tries and fails to get the story into an insular national press, and eventually only gains traction by presenting it as a tale of her silly crush and the hijinks that ensued. And eventually you realise: this book is her getting the word out. The story isn’t about her at all – the self-deprecation was, by the end, increasingly at odds with somebody so clearly capable and tenacious – it’s about the war crimes.

And this comes as a surprise. It’s called ‘The Worst Date Ever’. The cover is bright, flashy and, um, designed to attract both sexes¹. As I said, its non-fiction isn’t obvious, and the blurb says it’s ‘an extraordinary, funny and bittersweet adventure’. It’s not. It’s horrific. But, as she explains inside, horror wouldn’t get any traction – hell, I’m not going to pretend I’d willingly buy a book on Ugandan child enslavement – so the hook is the funny, bittersweet story. And I think this is an extremely clever thing.

It almost seems wrong to point this out. Part of the purpose, I assume, is to get the unpleasant facts to people – like me – who wouldn’t otherwise encounter them. Or, at least to present them in a way that gets under the radar. It’s not preachy, because people don’t like preachy (heaven forbid anyone preach about infanticide). Instead, the facts are made clear and the morality trojan-horsed within jokes, which explicitly don’t say what needs to be said. The humour is necessarily close to the bone, and does its job well, although even this is eventually superfluous – in the description of a ‘protection camp’, in which 14,000 people have so little food that they’re forced to prostitute their children to AIDS-ridden government soldiers, is the line ‘Finally, nothing was funny’. I worry that telling people what the book’s really about defeats the worthy purpose.

But there is a hint: the cover strapline is: ‘War crimes, Hollywood heart-throbs and other abominations’. That’s the rare perfect summary – the description is completely accurate, and the tone in keeping with that of the book, but it takes on a different meaning once you finish. And I expect most people will finish, because the story is so compelling. It certainly had an impact on me - the moment I turned the last page I was on Wikipedia, trying to find out whether the situation has improved, and over the last few weeks my ears have pricked up at any mention of Uganda. Hopefully, this was the idea².

I’d say it’s a perfect book club read – its subject matter is important, it’s well-written, there’s plenty to get your teeth into, and it should surprise everyone. The Worst Date Ever isn’t what it seems, and comes highly recommended by me.

1. he says, stereotypically
2. well – donating to appropriate charities too, I would imagine

Isn’t it cool? The message will be familiar to anyone familiar with Richard Dawkins’ writings: it’s wrong to label children with concepts beyond their understanding. The labels shown in the background – ‘Catholic child’, ‘Muslim child’, ‘Atheist child’, ‘Post-modernist child’ etc. – should all stick in the throat, as there are no such things (the BHA’s campaign page goes into more detail on the divisive and coercive nature of labelling children in this way). Like the original bus campaign, it’s about consciousness-raising – as Ariane Sherine says in her Comment is Free launch article:

We hope the advert’s message will encourage the government, media and general public to see children as individuals, free to make their own choices as soon as they are old enough to fully understand what these choices mean, and that they will think twice before describing children in terms of their parents’ religion in the future.

I played a very small role in the planning of this campaign, and I’m proud to be associated.

There have been many negative comments, of course. So far the complaints seem to be:

• “It won’t do any good.” – The aim is consciousness-raising – to get this idea more into the public domain. Anecdotal evidence suggests the bus campaign was tremendously successful at affecting public discourse around the world, and I don’t see why this shouldn’t be similarly capable.
• “Who are you to tell me how to raise my children?” – Firstly, if you don’t want to listen, don’t listen – nobody’s forcing you to do anything. Secondly, what’s wrong with expressing an opinion on how to raise children? Thirdly, they’re not ‘your’ children in the sense of ownership – you’re their guardians, not their owners, and they have rights as people that trump your rights as parents.
• “You’re smug and arrogant.” – Ad hominem attacks are pretty desperate.

Given the quality of the complaints so far, I think it’s going well.

I think that’s gorgeous, and not a little moving (though the music helps). I highly recommend clicking through to YouTube’s large HD version. Oh man, the shooting stars. This would have been entirely appropriate for Carl Sagan day, were I not a few hours late.

It was made using the camera of my dreams: the Canon EOS 5D Mark II. While this camera can record 1080p HD videos (and very lovely they are too) the above was actually made using a dolly with a stepper motor, allowing it to move-shoot-move.

It’s harder than it looks, too. That level of astronomical detail generally requires a long exposure time, but too much and the stars will be blurred: they move faster than you might think¹. A couple of the shots cleverly centre on the celestial north pole, which lessens this effect – stars closer to the pole will move more slowly, and you can actually see some blurring of stars at the far edges – but most aren’t. I guess it’s Yosemite, so there’s little problem with light pollution, but you still need a hell of a camera to pull off that kind of detail, at fast-ish shutter speeds, without noise. Sigh.

Via (amazingly) Technorati.

1. the moon is worse – anything over 1/8s will be blurred

I left school knowing what vaguely what evolution was, but with no understanding of how it underpins all of biology. Now I don’t understand how you can teach biology without it. I remember GCSE biology just being a bunch of disparate facts about animals and plants. The closest we got to evolution was having it drilled into us that a) camels have large feet, as they’re adapted to the deserts, and b) polar bears have clear fur, the relevance of which is still a mystery¹. These two facts were all we needed for the exam, so I duly wrote them down and paid no more attention. My science teacher obviously noticed this problem, and at the end of our final year gave a friend a copy of The Selfish Gene. Looking back, that was a pretty awesome thing to do. I didn’t find that book until three years later.

Hopefully these developments will see evolution built more fundamentally into the textbooks, and not just as another thing to learn.

1. and, now I look it up, a bit more complex than is perhaps necessary for an introduction to evolution

A few people asked if I was interesting in training as a celebrant, and while it definitely appeals I figure I’m too young. The average person there was probably ~50, with the youngest (hopefully I’m not offending anyone here) in their late 30s. I said so, and was independently told this wasn’t true – in fact, youth could well be a positive thing. I wondered whether a funeral might require a certain gravitas that can only come with age, but the celebrants I spoke to thought people who wanted a humanist funeral wouldn’t be bothered by something like that. Interesting. It’s certainly an incredibly positive, fulfilling thing to do, and I’d like to help. Maybe when uni’s over.

—

Photographically, it was a big job, so I hired a few toys useful bits of equipment, which were great fun very useful on the day. My friend Young Jim helped me test it all on the Friday, then came along to help at the weekend. Jim is just completing his PhD in physics at Oxford, so I used him as a voice-activated light stand. He was invaluable – enduring endless lighting test shots, managing queues of people, holding reflectors, spotting people walking off with my pen; it would have been far more difficult without him, and I owe him many thanks.

We went for a high-key look, with a completely white background and a bright subject, and I was very pleased with the results. This was especially pleasing as they came from a very lightweight Strobist setup of one umbrella, two flashes and a sheet. Our lighting setup covered quick-fire individual shots of all the attendees, and was pleasingly adaptable to a few couple-shots.

The only problem we had was a group shot of ~75 people, which we cleverly decided was best slotted in just before dinner. Note: do not ever try to slot in anything just before dinner. We had maybe two minutes to arrange everyone into something vaguely neat, and Jim handled this while I quickly became aware my wide-angle wasn’t going to be wide enough without standing on chairs, moving tables and backing off halfway across the room, all while 75 people looked hungrily at the bread rolls. The shot came out ok, although not great, and we’ll certainly know to do things differently next time.

Overall, it was great. I learnt a lot and met some fine people. I could get used to this.

For starters, one of the teachers was pretty hostile. She immediately asked if I’d heard the modern view that science just ‘proves’ whatever it wants to prove¹, and later called skeptics ‘annoying’. Another was clearly unconvinced but didn’t argue, while the third listens to Little Atoms but sometimes finds it a bit ‘fundamentalist’. I think my maybe-a-little-contemptuous response of ‘fundamentalist?!’ stopped him arguing further, but I’m not sure he was any more won over than the others.

I’m not really bothered what the teachers think of me, though – I’m more concerned that I came across a bit too strident to my classmates. I’m unused to speaking about skepticism to non-skeptics, and I worry I didn’t pay enough attention to we-attack-ideas-not-people. I spent ages trying to define modern skepticism², when I should perhaps have concentrated more on the general impression. I used the example of a recent lecturer who claimed racism is caused by stress over parental genitalia³. I called it a highly dubious realm-of-science claim, about an issue that actually matters, and said she needed to offer some evidence to back it up. This might have seemed a bit know-it-all. Plus, arguing with the teachers in front of everyone is probably self-indulgent. Given that organised skepticism genuinely isn’t unfriendly, I’m annoyed that I may have promoted it badly. Sigh.

That said, I’m somewhat sleep-deprived after the past week and it’s possible my judgement is off, but I’ve felt slightly abashed all evening. Grmph. Still – they approved my idea!

1. I replied that I didn’t think any scientist would recognise this, when I should have just said ‘how would that work?’
2. eventually coming up with ’skepticism is the study of things that are interestingly or harmfully wrong’, which I was quite happy with
3. standard psychoanalytic stuff

“I am talking about a long-standing discipline—an art and a science—that has been with us since ancient Egyptian, Roman, Babylonian and Assyrian times. It is part of the Chinese, Muslim and Hindu cultures… Criticism is deeply offensive to those cultures,” says Tredinnnick: “and I have a Muslim college in my constituency.”

That’s Conservative MP David Tredinnick defending his view that the moon is evil. To cleanse:

The honourable Member for Braintree cited evidence from The Sun, so I want to refer to a recent edition of the British Medical Journal.

That’s Evan Harris, Lib Dem MP for Oxford West & Abingdon (from a different debate).

Really. It’s exactly what you’re thinking. And yes – the first ten seconds actually happened.

The short-lived show was renamed Captain Janeway Kate Loves A Mystery – I am not making this up – before getting swiftly cancelled. I am now on a mission to find a full-length episode.

(info originally found in the pleasingly positive It Is Just You, Everything’s Not Shit.)