Archive for the ‘Religion & Politics’ Category

My friend Stuart Ritchie, who is currently working towards his PhD in Psychology at the University of Edinburgh, was recently involved in a writing a paper looking at the relationship between IQ and religious adherence.

While you will find a far more in depth write up on Stuart’s blog, the key points found that there is a correlation between higher IQ and lower scores in five of the six measured used to gauge people’s religious belief.

The only factor which did not see this pattern was people who just described themselves as “spiritual.”

Interestingly, another of my friends is currently researching this area, and the results so far suggest that there is a link between describing yourself as spiritual is correlated with bad parenting – but I can’t comment further on this until the research has been completed.

Recently, I signed a petition to retain the ban on the death penalty.

Initially, I didn’t think it worth it. Why? Because Parliament would never approve the death penalty being brought back into British society, and even if they did, Europe would just override them anyway. We don’t have to worry about the death penalty coming back.

However, having initially rejected the idea out of concern it would give the debate some genuine legitimacy, I in the end decided to sign it because if enough of us do, we don’t even have to have the faux-debate. I’m proud to see more pople standing up to say of course we don’t want the death penalty back, than people signing up to say we do.

As I write this, the petition to retain the ban currently has the 5th most signatures of any petition, the most popular bring back the death penalty petition is only 8th.

As you may have noticed, we recently experienced some riots in the UK.

Everything was fine here in Leeds. Someone got shot in Chapeltown, but that is just a normal evening in Chapeltown. In fact, rather than a riot, we had a march of peace while other cities were kicking off. Good old Yorkshire values present such destruction, as we just stick kettle on instead (and it’s important to note I didn’t say stick the kettle on.

Two things I found interesting though.

Firstly, the amount of people who turn out to be rather right wing when it affects their lives. We should lock them up, evict them, beat school children with a cane and possibly bring back the death penalty should Facebook comments and tweets be believed.

Obviously we shouldn’t do this, we want to live in a fear-free progressive society, not a police state.

The second is that, the remaining people, though relatively few in number, seemed to think that those who were behind the riots, shouldn’t take much responsibility at all. It’s due to underlying social issues and the forgotten generation, so it isn’t their fault.

Of course this is equally nonsense. Even if there are underlying social causes, which there are, but rather contributing factors than absolute causes, people need to take some responsibility for their actions and nothing that took place in the past week is justified – stealing a loaf of bread for your starving family is justified, looting a shop isn’t.

So basically, if you expressed an opinion on the riots, you were probably wrong about it ;). But I look forward to blog posts from other people explaining to me why my middle of the road approach is nonsense as well… :D.

It’s everyone’s favourite time of year again – the debate as to whether exams are getting easier.

Yet again of course, exam results have gone up and everyone is asking “have exams gotten easier?” The answer, of course, is yes. Clearly if such a large sample size as the whole of the United Kingdom, probably going on a million children, have consistently achieved higher grades than last year, the exams are getting easier.

The educational community will quickly argue that it is in fact teaching methods getting better, but this to me, seems irrelevant. Even if it is teaching methods getting better, which I’m not disputing – I’m sure they are, if the exams stay the same and don’t get more challenging in proportion to teaching methods getting better, then from the perspective of the child, the exam has got easier – with the same amount of effort and intelligent on their part, they are able to achieve a higher grade.

You can then argue that, given they have done better in the exam, they deserve that higher grade, but I disagree. Firstly, just because teaching methods have improved to allow them to do better, doesn’t mean that they have actually learnt more – maybe teaching methods have just improved in terms of teaching kids to pass exams and not actually learn more, which seems a very plausible scenario.

Secondly, even if they are more knowledgeable about a specific subject, doesn’t mean they necessarily deserve a higher grade. That sounds counter-intuitive at first, but in reality the main purpose of exams is to test how intelligent someone is and just because schools have found a way to better put knowledge into their head in order to pass an exam doesn’t really help that purpose. On that basis, the only reason that exam results should go up is if children are genuinely getting more intelligent – this could be the case but I haven’t seen any evidence to show it’s happening, at least at the same rate as exam results are improving.

Therefore, I would argue that the constant year on year improvement in exam performance, is a problem.

The solution, I would put forward is percentile banding of exam results. Rather than setting specific levels which a candidate has to reach, you put all the results together and give a certain percentile each grade – for example the top ten percent get A*, the next ten percent get an A, the next ten percent get a B and so on.

I’m not arguing this is a perfect system, and you probably need to have something in place where there isn’t a “fail” percentile, if possible, but below I will outline why I think it would arguably be a fairer system than the current one.

Primarily, it ends the debate on whether exams are getting easier. Every year exam results would stay the same, because the same percentage of people will get each grade, and it doesn’t matter if exams get easier or harder because the system sorts itself out. It is impossible to make exams the exact same difficulty every year because you have to change them and under the current system, children are unfairly punished if they happen to get a slightly harder exam and unfairly rewarded if they happen to get a slightly easier exam. This eliminates that.

Secondly, it stops the grade creep which leads to everyone getting grades closer and closer to the top and therefore makes it harder for universities and employers to distinguish between the top candidates.

There are criticisms of such a system, and I will deal with these now.

Firstly, it means that a child could lose a grade just because they end up in a year where everyone does well. This doesn’t really stand up because, because of the sample size involved, if everyone else does well it is more likely to be because the exam is slightly easier this year and therefore they haven’t lost a grade, they simply weren’t good enough to achieve it.

Indeed, sample size is important. When dealing with an entire year group, which as I previously stated I would imagine is heading towards a million children, the probability that an entire generation happened to suddenly be more intelligent than the year before, is far less likely than this year’s exams simply being a little easier.

You could also argue that everyone deserves the change to get an A* if they achieve the required level. There are two parts to this answer, first of all, they have target just like the current system – except, instead of a specific number of marks, their target is to reach the top ten percentile, but either way they have a set, fixed target to reach. Secondly, you could argue that if everyone in the country all worked really, really hard, they should all deserve to get A*.

This is true, but this has never, ever happened. Indeed, what is the probability that this would ever happen? The answer of course is negligable, when you are dealing with such a big sample size, it evens out and you don’t get disadvantaged by statistical anomlies as you do under the current system.

So…

You could replace the current system with a banded percentile system and ensure that the grades accurately reflect a candidates performance, irrelevant of how accurate the difficulty level of the exam was and without worry that they were disadvantaged due to circumstance because of the sample sizes involved. This will then allow employers and universities to accurately select the best candidates, which is the whole point of standardised testing after all. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s arguably fairer than the current one.

Unfortunately, there would be very little incentive to change because the current system plays into the favour of schools and governments, because it makes them look like they have done better every year. This is probably true, but at the disadvantage that it makes the achievement far less meaningful.

Last Saturday, the Leeds Slutwalk took place. Slutwalks are protest marches which assert a woman’s right to dress how she wants without being blamed for getting raped because she was somehow asking for it. Unfortunately, the Leeds event suffered from a somewhat poor turn out but was a worthwhile event in any case.

As usual, the red flags of Revolution also turned up to cloud the message too. Still, at least it added to the numbers.

We had a very interesting discussion at work today, when I brought up the idea that you should do away with separate competitions for men and women, and just have one unisex league.

Football is a great example of this. Women’s football is not a popular sport by pretty much any measure. Faye White, captain of the England team reportedly earns £16,000 a year. That is just above minimum wage and for the most part, even women in the top flight of their profession cannot earn anything other than what would be considered a semi-professional wage, having to have another job as well.

Women’s football is barely televised, if at all. Not to mention garnering little respect from people like FIFA president Sepp Blatter who suggested that women should “wear tighter shorts and low cut shirts… to create a more female aesthetic” (and you didn’t think it was possible to lose any more respect for Sepp Blatter 😉 ).

There is a simple solution to this problem.

Just combine men’s and women’s football into one unified league structure.

This is much more inline with equal opportunities. At the moment, women are absolutely and unreservedly banned from competing in the top flight of football of earning a professional football’s wage, entirely because of their gender. Even if a woman was the best player in the world, she would be limited to playing in a league which earns less than half what I do and receiving very little exposure.

Allowing both genders to complete in the same league means that everyone gets the chance to complete on a level playing field, based on their ability.

Now, to address some of the concerns.

Firstly, the idea that women aren’t as strong as men. This is somewhat of an issue in football, but far more clear in other sports (boxing or hammer throw for example). But this doesn’t matter. When it comes to equal opportunities, you need to give everyone the same chance, and some people are always going to be better than overs.

You could argue it is better for a woman to compete on the top flight of women’s football than a lower tier of a mixed gender league system, but I disagree. Separating the leagues presents a ceiling to which they cannot rise above, no matter how prestigious people might try to suggest it is.

Secondly, the idea that women aren’t as good as men. It is true that the top flight of women’s football isn’t the same standard as men’s, but that could be down to a number of factors. Women are unable to complete in professional men’s football, so don’t have the opportunity to play week in week out against top competition. Society generally has a bias towards men playing football (not helped by the fact that only men are allowed to play in the top leagues). Statistically, more men play football than women, so statistically you’re also going to get a better standard.

But none of these reasons say that women can’t play football as well as men, it just says that in the current setup in society, they generally don’t. But again, it presents a level playing field it you give everyone the same chance.

I think it is also worth considering that a lot of people simply aren’t going to make it, female or male. You can make the argument that women would never make it into the World Cup squad in a combined league, but then neither would I. I’m not that good at football. I used to play for my school team, I trained, but I was never that good, let alone world standard.

Yet nobody says, “well we should have a separate world cup for geeks, because they can never compete with real men.” Why? Because we’re given the same opportunity. If I had the skill we could be up there. Whereas a woman who did have the skill, couldn’t.

Finally however, you don’t have to have to accept it as a perfect solution. It isn’t. Women would really, really struggle to make it into the top flight of football (though we can’t say for sure because women don’t have the same opportunities to train up through the professional system as men do).

But, all it has to do is be better than the current system.

Even if women only made it into league one or two, they would still earn more than they can at the moment. They would be able to compete in games which were televised more and gain far more exposure, encouraging more girls to participate in sport. Finally, it would make things more equitable because everyone would have the chance to compete, based on ability, in the same competition.

Last Saturday the EDL held a protest in Dewsbury. Although, the first I knew about it, was when a bunch of their supporters came running past my window in the centre of Leeds. Luckily, as I explained last week, Twitter soon had be clued up what was going on.

I spent a bit of time watching the Twitter updates, with both sides tweeting live, and had to giggle a bit when a guy named Ged Robinson kept asking them what was the point in doing protest events when a much better way to engage would be to talk to the moderate Muslims.

This may be a good point, but there is a certain level if irony with someone spending a large amount of their time engaging in the futile activity of trying to put a rational argument to people who will never accept such points, telling them their efforts are futile.

The police were soon hot on the trail however and within a few minutes, there were half a dozen police vans parked outside my house.

We often joke about Godwin’s law so it’s easy to forget that sometimes, people are actually silly enough to try and use it as a legitimate argument.

A few months ago, 4Thoughts, a series of short commentaries by Channel 4, did a week on religious slaughter, a topic which I wrote about a few days ago. The first of which was by a man named Chanoch Kesselman who literally said, the first thing the Nazi’s did was to ban ritual slaughter, and then they killed six million Jews. You can watch the video here.

In total there were seven videos on the subject, though they didn’t prevent a very balanced argument. Only one of the videos was by a non-religious person, the rest were from believers. Two of which were Christians, but you really can’t call what they said being supportive to either side. Only Helen Rossiter made the case that animal welfare considerations might want to play a part in a decision about animal welfare.

On April 10th, I wrote to all my local MEPs, asking them to support legislation in the European parliament which would require all meat to be clearly labelled as to whether it was slaughtered by humane of religious methods.

If you aren’t aware of the background, animals slaughtered in the UK must be done do by first pre-stunning the animal to make it unconscious before you kill it. However, Islamic and Jewish communities have an exemption from this law which allows them to slaughter the animal while still fully conscious by slitting their throat and then leaving them to slowly bleed to death as they thrash around in pain. It’s pretty horrific, which is why the governments advisory board, the Farm Animal Welfare Council, advised the exemption should be removed immediately.

What is worse however, is that many restaurants and shops, including high street supermarkets, often sell Halal meat as regular meat, without any labeling – you could be eating meat from an animal that was unethically slaughtered and not even know it.

While the ultimate solution is to remove this exception, which would be the fair thing to do in our modern secular society – we’re not asking for anything special, just that the law by applied to us all equally without the current discrimination that happens, at the very least it should be a requirement to label meat as having come from religious slaughter, so that those of us with an ethical conscience, can choose to avoid it.

Only three of the MEPs I wrote to responded, here is what they said:

Timothy Kirkhope MEP from the Conservatives told me that his colleague, which sits on the ENVI committee was doing everything possible to support this legislation, stressing that his concern was animal welfare and allowing consumers to make an informed choice.

Godfrey Bloom MEP from UKIP told me that he opposed the legislation because he didn’t support any legislation that came from Europe and therefore detracted from our sovereign power. From what I can work out, it seems UKIP candidates just sit in the European Parliament and cheer at the entire proceedings. Still, that is probably what the electorate want them to do.

Linda McAvan MEP from Labour told me that she supported legislation that required meat to be properly labelled and had voted for this before – but would not be voting on this one because they didn’t feel it was appropriate (nothing to do with it having been proposed by a Conservative of course).

She also said it was important that religious slaughter, while it should be properly labelled, should be allowed to continue. I replied to her on this, challenging the idea of religious privilege over applying the law fairly and consistently to all. She responded, saying that the views of the Muslim and Jewish communities took precedence but also said that while the exemption exists, 80-90% of religiously slaughtered animals were actually pre-stunned.

On Thursday May 5th, I voted yes to the alternative vote.

Not strictly because I actually wanted the alternative vote, but because the no campaign had been so shocking immoral. If it wasn’t massively exaggerating the cost of implementing AV by including the cost of the referendum (which thanks to the no campaign we still had to pay for even though nothing has changed) it was billboards with messages like “she needs a maternity ward, not an alternative vote.” As soon as that slogan was released, they should have lost the argument on something equivalent to Godwin’s Law.

Not to mention that most of the no campaign has been based on complete lies. Their website scare mongers with claims AV would elect the BNP even though under AV it would actually be more difficult for the BNP to get elected. They trick people by saying almost nobody uses AV even though many countries use even more progressive systems than AV.

Clearly there is something very much wrong with the morality lf those on the side of the no campaign. Even before you discover the BNP are opposed to AV as well.

Some people would argue that simply not liking one side of the argument isn’t a good enough reason to vote for the other. Unfortunately, we weren’t provided with much else to make the decision on.

The yes campaign was appalling. I got a flyer taking about “more of the same” and fat cat MPs getting expenses and still to this day it remains a mystery as to how these could be considered arguments for AV. Dan Snow’s video was excellent but I only watched it a few days after the referendum which leads me to believe that most people didn’t see it at all.

The yes campaign simply failed to convince people that AV was a good idea.

The second problem, is that the yes campaign simply doesn’t have that strong an argument. First past the post is a good system, it means the person with the most votes wins. While it does mean that less than 50% of people vote for the chosen candidate that less people wanted to elect that another candidate. AV, on balance, probably is a better system. But only just.

Which leads me on to my other reason for voting for AV. Ultimately, it’s a step forward to a more progressive system of voting. If we ever do want to move to a more proportional representation system, this would have been a good stepping stone. Not to mention that if it did turn out to be a rubbish system in reality, we could just change it back. That’s the great thing about trying new things. But alas, it’s not to be.