But of course, de Botton thinks that this project is in the public good. The Guardian reports that he sees this as an example of those “awe-inspiring buildings that give people a better sense of perspective on life”. As many critics have already pointed out, though, a sense of perspective – whatever that might mean to you – can be attained from various sources other than temples. Andrew Copson (chief executive of the British Humanist Society) is quoted as saying, “the things religious people get from religion – awe, wonder, meaning and perspective – non-religious people get them from other places like art, nature, human relationships and the narratives we give our lives in other ways”.

Richard Dawkins (whose “destructive” atheism de Botton envisages atheism 2.0 as combating) has also spoken of finding awe and wonder in the natural world – see, for examples, his wonderful book Unweaving the Rainbow. (As an aside, with the exception of some passages in The God Delusion, it seems to me entirely false that Dawkins fits this “destructive” caricature that de Botton, Eagleton and others like to present.)

But de Botton has responded to some of the concerns regarding this building, and in particular the idea that atheism needs a “temple”. An emailed statement from de Botton can be read at Hanna Thomas’ blog, where he states that

contemporary architecture [should] look more closely at the examples of religious architecture, in order to give their buildings some of the qualities that are most appealling in religious buildings; to put it bluntly, in order that these effects not reside heretofore only in the cul-de-sac of religious architecture.

As is sometimes the case with jokes – where explaining them tends to deepen embarrassment, or further highlight the weakness of the joke - this statement (you should read the whole thing) doesn’t make the idea of atheist temples any more sensible, or any less facile. Architects are surely already aware of the majesty of many cathedrals and religious buildings, and are already borrowing the elements they find worthwhile. This process doesn’t need formalisation, or a new name, or to be roped into the service of presenting atheism as a unifying creed/society/club of any sort.

Atheists are connected, or similar, in not being theistic. Beyond that, we’re just like everyone else. For some, cathedrals remain awe-inspiring, as do beautiful parts of the natural landscape. If I was inclined to gaze at things while pondering meaning or mortality, there’s no shortage of impressive things to look at while doing so. The fact that some of them were built in the service of religion makes no difference to me, except for the fact that I’ll tend to not enter them when people are praying, singing hymns or delivering sermons (as examples from one set of traditions).

Then there are some who don’t care much for architecture or natural beauty. I’m more in this camp than in the former one, but this doesn’t mean that I lack triggers or reasons for being taken “out of the everyday”, “encourag[ing] contemplation, perspective and (at times) a pleasing terror”. Books and films do that, as do people, the tribal loyalties of being a football fan, and so forth.

For some, shopping malls could do it too – who knows. But if it’s buildings as works of art, or fulcrums of inspiration that you’re after, it’s not only the case that (as I mention above) I’d be very surprised if architects aren’t already aware that features from religious buildings do the trick. Second, there’s no shortage of ostensibly “secular buildings” that are pretty darn awe-inspiring in their own right. Consider, for example, the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, or the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao.

As with the very idea of atheism 2.0, de Botton is dressing up the obvious as if it’s insightful. And his further explanation of how he thinks these are good ideas don’t make them appear any more so.

[EDIT]: de Botton’s statement was also sent to Richard Wiseman (and others), and is attracting some good comments on Wiseman’s blog.

It’s easy to forget that arguments in favour of unfettered free speech often come from positions of privilege. That privilege could be economic, social or educational, but whatever its origin, the result can be a bewilderment at the thought that anybody could find mere words offensive enough to censure.

I’ve made this sort of case before, defending various people and a wide range of utterances – from Floyd Shivambu and Kuli Roberts to Annelie Botes. A consistent thread in those columns has been that we learn nothing by silencing odious voices – that it’s only through being exposed to opinions that make us uncomfortable that we develop defences against them.

Again, it’s easy for some of us to say these sorts of things. It’s easy for me. For others it’s less so, especially if you might have been subjected to years or generations of abuse. So the idealism of a position – mine, broadly speaking – which entails hoping that society will at some point grow up and learn to deal with offence can easily seem rather smug – not to mention condescending.

However, it remains paternalistic to impose constraints on what we’re allowed to read and hear when those constraints are intended to protect us from offence. We don’t have the right to be shielded from all potential offence, even if there may be cases where the offence is simply gratuitous rather than potentially instructive (even if not instructive to the target of the offensive claim, then to the wider audience that is exposed to it).

But conclusions regarding whether a particular case intends gratuitous offence or not are subjective ones, also complicated by the emotive nature of many such cases. A recent case involved an Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) decision against River’s Church, who were instructed to take a billboard down following a complaint by Eugene Gerber.

Gerber is reported as saying that the “billboard offends him as an atheist as he does not consider his existence to be an accident. Secondly, the depiction of a man with an empty head communicates that atheists are stupid”. In comments to an article addressing the judgement and the apparent contradiction of an atheist (where atheists often defend their right to offend the religious), Gerber clarified his motivation for the complaint, saying:

During our darker apartheid years, it was ultimately the reaction and pressure from the international community that allowed us to move into a democratic society. And now, as our free speech rights are dying a slow death in South Africa, we once again need the world to take note and join our outcry.

So one atheist in South Africa gets a Christian billboard taken down, and blogs all over the world (atheist and Christian alike) are up in arms about my infringement on free speech. Yet, about a month ago, a Christian had a television commercial taken off air for exactly the same reason, and not even a peep on the internet about free speech. My options were simple, impede on their free speech but the get the message out there that our country needs help, or let them have their billboard and sit back and watch free speech decline. The latter was simply unacceptable.

So as long as their [sic] are people out there who voice the concern at me being able to have a billboard removed, I think I made the right choice. Hopefully the next headline you read is ‘Atheist tries in vain to have billboard removed’.

Limiting free speech for the sake of protecting it is certainly counter-intuitive, yet not obviously mistaken. Gerber could have been attempting to highlight how easily claims of being offended can result in limitations on freedom of speech, thus gesturing at a broader, perhaps systemic problem. But the evidence for this motivation is sketchy – not only because examples of these sorts of limiting moves are easy to find, but also because he appears to be wrong about the facts.

Assuming that the television commercial Gerber is referring to is Unilever’s Axe Excite advertisement, featuring “super-hot angels crashing to Earth” then smashing their halos in order to (presumably) be able to “know” the man wearing the deodorant in question, it’s simply not true that this ASA decision went unnoticed. My browser bookmarks include five newspaper articles and three blog posts – most of them explicitly concerned with whether the ASA was being overly sensitive towards claims of offence.

Just as with the Axe advertisement, one can ask whether the River’s Church billboard was sufficiently offensive to merit censure. While these are subjective judgements, a broader question is whether the ASA should even be placed in a position of needing to make them – especially if they are placed in this position by those who regularly protest the hypersensitivity of others to criticism.

The ASA ruling on the billboard was at least consistent with the Axe ruling. But if a depiction of an atheist having an “empty head” (itself a subjective reading – I’d be happy to entertain the charitable possibility that this image depicts a head lacking in certain beliefs) or believing that they are accidents now meets a threshold of unacceptable offence, then that threshold is far too low.

Regulation of advertisements that make false claims is certainly merited. But in this case, as a colleague (and atheist) pointed out, many of us might know as fact that we are accidents. As for having empty heads, well, as Psalm 14.1 reminds us “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’” If a billboard isn’t allowed to call unbelievers fools (on the uncharitable, and more plausible reading), would Gerber now have us petitioning for the Bible to be withdrawn from sale, or edited to remove content offensive to atheists?

Gerber’s complaint to the ASA was hypersensitive and misguided, in that it serves to undermine free speech arguments in more typical cases involving things like blasphemy. But as I’ve indicated, some feel better equipped to shrug off insults than others, and cases like these are thin ends of very thick wedges. Speech (and advertisements are of course a complicated example of speech) can create a climate of hostility, serving as propaganda for encouraging negative attitudes towards certain groups.

I do still hope that we can learn to deal with these insults without feeling the need to run to the courts or the ASA for protection. It remains true that any restrictions on free speech on the basis of offence put us on an unprincipled and very slippery slope. And, as I’ve argued before, freedom to cause offence doesn’t mean that it’s the right thing for us to do. Somehow, though, I wish we could find a mechanism to shut some people up – but only the deserving ones, of course.

The first concern this talk raises is that it starts from a presumption that so-called “new atheism” is the only game in town. It sets up a false dichotomy between “living in a spiritual wasteland” and being a churchgoing zombie, which allows de Botton to swoop in and propose “atheism 2.0″ to fill the gap between those extremes. In atheism 2.0, we would develop secular mechanisms akin to religion’s “giant machines, organisations, directed to managing our inner life“. But the “new atheism” trope can quite plausibly be described as a caricature, especially if put in the terms de Botton begins with in the TED talk. Yes, there are lighting-rod type atheists, just as you’ll find more vocal proponents of any contested view. This sort of engagement isn’t compulsory, and it’s to my mind not even typical – it’s simply one element of a strategic interaction with religious believers, in an attempt to persuade them of the wrongness of their views.

Of course it’s true that religions have been very effective in inculcating certain beliefs, habits and dispositions. But they have done so partly by dissuading thought – by creating an impression that certain propositions have the strongest possible truth value, because “God” says they are true, and you can’t argue with that. Any attempt at creating an organised – but secular – form of religion should immediately make atheists wary, because part of the point of a reason-motivated life is that groupthink is in general a poor guide to truth. I can agree with part of what de Botton says, in that he points out the dangers of a potential lack of “moral mentorship” once one escapes from whatever doctrinal understanding of morality your religion brings, or brought. Even here, though, we have all sorts of competing grand narratives already – things like human equality, justice, rights and free speech – which are arguably already as or more entrenched in human minds than any moral notion that results directly from a religion. For better or worse, those sorts of concepts already constitute a kind of groupthink – and if “atheism 2.0″ is meant to encourage them, de Botton is offering us an empty box with pretty wrapping.

But that’s not all “atheism 2.0″ is good for – we should, according to de Botton, borrow elements of religion to improve things like education, and to find sources of consolation. Listen to the talk yourself – he describes various ways in which elements of religion can be deployed in order to help us to understand “how to live”. Again, the stuff that works has either already been secularised or will be, or was never “owned” by religion in the first place. As for education, PZ Myers is right in dismissing de Botton’s claims that our educational practices can benefit through using sermonising techniques such as repetition. And of course we can be more effective public speakers – but that’s something we can learn through experience, or Toastmasters. We don’t need to study the techniques of the person behind the pulpit.

As for meaning, art, and sources of consolation: Of course we might all get value from ritual, ceremony, community and so forth. Most of us do this already in celebrating birthdays or anniversaries, and even in those regular social interactions with people we know, trust and love. This doesn’t need a label, and doesn’t need any formalising through inventing a new way of being secular.

In summary, here’s the thing: of course we can learn from religion. We can learn from anything, and already do so. But it’s not true – at least in my experience – that there are “so many gaps in secular life”, as de Botton claims. It’s only if you grant that premise, and furthermore claim that religion provides opportunities for learning that aren’t available elsewhere, that religion can be granted any form of privileged status as a source of meaning. The status that it might have is already accommodated in good old-fashioned atheism, and atheism 2.0 seems to be little more than the theme for a book-tour. Which is fine – I wish I could make as much profit from saying so little – but let’s not imagine there’s anything particularly interesting in the idea.

While President Obama could be accused of trying to curry favour with moral conservatives in rejecting the FDA’s recommendations on the “morning-after pill”, liberals can find some comfort in the fact that he’s at least pro-contraception, and isn’t planning to criminalise abortions just yet.

This puts him at odds with nearly every (plausible) Republican candidate with the exception of Mitt Romney who, while having changed his mind and become pro-life in 2004, is at least not a signatory to the regressive “Personhood Pledge” that has to date been signed by Santorum, Gingrich, Perry and Paul.

Ron Paul’s case is complicated by the addendum to his signing of the pledge, in which he disagrees with the Pledge’s assertion that the 14th amendment (which protects individual liberties from state encroachment) has a role to play in defending the interests of the unborn. While the addendum has led to some questioning of the sincerity of his commitment to the Pledge, he is nevertheless clear that “life begins at conception”, and that “it is the duty of the government to protect life”.

Of those who have not signed the Pledge (Huntsman and Romney), both want to repeal Roe vs. Wade, and Huntsman supports the introduction of a right to life amendment to the Constitution. While Romney thinks that current legislation has “cheapened the value of human life”, his stated intentions are to put abortion legislation in the hands of the state, rather than the Federal government.

Broadly speaking, then – because the details are, well, very detailed – all the candidates are pro-life to varying degrees of commitment. And while Romney and Paul can be credited with at least attempting to introduce a level of sophistication to their positions instead of simply appealing to the emotive fervour of a conservative base, the rest of the contenders speak of pre-born humans in terms that assume that the debate has an obvious conclusion, where a woman’s rights over her own body, and what to do with it, are significantly weakened.

As in most emotive issues, language is important here. A bias is immediately introduced in using terms like “pro-life”, given that it suggests an anti-life stance on the part of those that support abortion. Speaking of “unborn” or “pre-born” children introduces a similar bias, in that it encourages us to think of blastocysts, zygotes, embryos and foetuses as if they already had desires and aspirations capable of being dashed by those callous “anti-life” Democrats.

It is in the Personhood Pledge that these biases come to the fore in all their glory, where “every human being at every stage of development must be recognized as a person possessing the right to life”. While the Pledge’s opposition to assisted suicide and euthanasia increase the intended threats to individual liberty, it’s the language on abortion that is of most concern here.

Because it’s not only this pledge, but also a legislative move that should be seen as a concern. It should be concerning to Americans – most directly American women – but also to the rest of us, in that these sorts of developments can easily serve as example and inspiration to those who want to undermine South African liberties in this regard. It’s not only the ACDP that might want to do so – President Zuma’s visit to the Rhema Church during campaigning in 2009 included a reassurance that he’d be willing to entertain changes to legislation permitting both abortion and same-sex marriages.

The (American) legislation at issue is H.R.358, the Protect Life Act, which passed the House of Representatives in October 2011. The bill is considered unlikely to pass in the Senate, and President Obama intends to veto it even if it does. But in the hypothetical absence of the current Democratic Senate and President, the bill gives a clear insight into the how dedicated the current crop of Republicans in the House are to defend the unborn human, no matter how nebulous its form.

The first version of the bill submitted to the House by Rep. Joe Pitts (R-PA) called for a modification of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to only allow for health plans to cover abortions in cases of “forcible rape or, if a minor, an act of incest”. Women who fall pregnant as a result of gentle rape – or adult victims of incest – must presumably have had it coming.

That language was removed in the bill that passed the House (you can see each version here), which now allows for coverage in the event of “an act of rape or incest”. But this concession to the reality of women sometimes needing an abortion through no fault of their own does not address some of the worst aspects of the bill.

The Protect Life Act, if signed into law, would prevent women from buying even a private insurance plan through a state health care exchange (these are not insurers themselves, but entities that attempt to promote insurance transparency and accountability) if that plan covers abortions – even though most private insurance plans currently cover abortion.

It would require any insurer that operates under an exchange and covers abortion to also offer otherwise identical plans that exclude abortion coverage. The administrative costs of managing two near-identical schemes – where one would do, save this conservative agenda – might well result in many insurers thinking it’s simply not worth the trouble to offer a plan that covers abortion.

Of course, consumers can join a plan that isn’t offered through an exchange. But because of the extra visibility of plans offered under an exchange, and the consumer protections ensured by these exchanges, it seems likely that the only women who would do so are those who are well-informed and financially advantaged – raising the possibility of this bill introducing a bias against the poor, who need more protection than most.

Perhaps worst of all, the bill opens up an avenue for softening current requirements under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), signed into law by Reagan to protect poor and uninsured patients who need emergency care. The Protect Life Act would allow hospitals that are morally opposed to performing abortions to withhold treatment in cases where a woman requires an emergency abortion in order to save her life.

As Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) says of her own experience in this regard: “I was pregnant, I was miscarrying, I was bleeding. If I had to go from one hospital to the next trying to find one emergency room that would take me in, who knows if I would even be here today. What my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are trying to do is misogynist”.

Nobody should be required to die for the sake of someone else’s religious beliefs. And while I can understand the desire for abortion to be treated as a non-trivial matter, we shouldn’t satisfy this desire at the cost of eroding an existing and thinking person’s rights over her own body. While life might begin at conception, individual rights do not. This is the sort of case in which we might hope that public representatives attempt to fight the tide of populist sentiment, rather than allowing the most reactionary forms of that sentiment to stand the chance of influencing policy.

By contrast, Jack Bloom (DA Leader in the Gauteng legislature) seems to have no qualms in putting God at front and centre as a potential answer to South Africa’s ills, regardless of the diversity of belief among those who voted for his party (not to mention a large number of those who work for his party). In fact, God seems to have been here all along, not only facilitating the “transition from Apartheid”, but also working abroad in spurring the abolitionist movement against slavery, and inspiring people to formulate the “democratic concepts that led to the American Revolution”.

There’s no question that Bloom is sincere, and that he believes religion can play a role in encouraging people to think about their moral obligations. Sadly for those of us who think morality can only be principled if also secular, he’s in agreement with the DA’s general position here, where the party says that religion “should serve as a moral and spiritual inspiration“.

But even this view (the mistaken one, that morality and religion are easy bedfellows) is at least comprehensible, given that our country is mostly religious. Comprehensible, not reasonable, because if we need more prayer and less politics (as Bloom argues), surely the ACDP would have a far higher share of the votes?

What’s most egregious about Bloom’s opinion piece is that he by and large simply makes things up as he goes along, plucking historical events out of the timeline and – without any evidence (unless you count dubious correlations as evidence, which you shouldn’t) – attributes them to prayer and religion. It’s true that Lanphier drove a large Christian revival movement in the US during the mid-1800′s, yes, but to say that it was the Christianity – rather than basic human compassion or economics – that informed the abolition of slavery is an entirely circular argument, which assumes what it purports to demonstrate.

The American Revolution – also offered by Bloom as evidence for the power of prayer – seems more plausibly explained by something like the first 13 colonies revolting against rule by the British Empire, regardless of whether some or many the revolutionaries were religious. Their desire to be free doesn’t need religion to make sense, and it seems entirely spurious – and again circular – to use this as evidence for us needing more prayer and less politics.

And then of course there’s the elephant in the room: namely, that the data overwhelmingly suggest that on any benchmark of morality you care to pick, secular countries usually outperform religious ones. Corruption? Check. Divorce rates? Check. Crime? Check. Do a comparison for whatever measure you like using something like Google’s public data explorer, or read a simple and short book like Sinnott-Armstrong’s Morality without God.

One of the saddest aspects of public utterances like this from DA leaders, for me, is the fact that the DA has one clear advantage over other contenders in the political arena: the effective, and entirely pragmatically motivated, delivery of goods and services. That’s their clear competitive advantage, and the drum they should be beating more loudly than any other. But when a DA official – and a highly placed one at that – tells us that he hopes to outsource his job to God (at best) or collective insanity (at worst), it only reinforces the fear that populism is taking the place of common sense.

Bloom closes his piece with “maybe if we all prayed more the social change we desire will happen”. Seeing as all the existing studies of prayer’s efficacy show no effects (or in at least one case, negative effects), don’t hold your breath.

Edit: This post as well as a reply from Jack Bloom can be found on PoliticsWeb, where you’ll also find some entertaining comments. Also see another Christian perspective from Jordan Pickering.

First, it remains true that we have no compelling evidence that pornography necessarily causes harm in itself. I can’t dispute that some people have had miserable lives, or been exploited and abused in the production of pornography. It’s true that it’s an industry which conduces to trafficking, and it’s plausible that it might lead some consumers to dysfunctional attitudes towards sexuality, gender equality and so forth. These are unwelcome and regrettable correlates of porn.

But as one can’t seem to say often enough, correlation doesn’t equal causation. The fact that many people consume pornography from within healthy relationships, or as singletons who are not disposed towards seal-clubbing, satanic rituals or violence against women and children shows that it’s possible for porn to come without these complications. Which tells us that as much as some production and consumption of porn can come with problems, those problems can be addressed directly without needing to shut down an entire industry. If it ends up being true that these problems are inescapably part of porn production, then I’d agree that porn should be more strictly controlled, and perhaps even eliminated (if that were possible). But they’re not, or at least we have no good evidence that they are.

Which leaves us in a position of having to balance various interests. On the one hand, we have TopTV (or Multichoice), who want to make money. They do this by offering a service that consumers want, in this case porn. If they’re wrong, and consumers don’t want it, then the channels will most likely be pulled. But what they are planning to offer is legal, and they are entitled to do so. Of course they should (from their own self-interested point of view, as well as from the point of view of not causing needless offence) do so in a responsible way. Their plan is to offer these 3 channels as an opt-in service at an extra cost each month. So, parents need to choose whether to allow these channels in their homes or not.

This is stage 1 of the firewall that protects the innocent, fragile children. Unless a parent chooses to subscribe, Jenny and Johnny won’t be exposed to any part of the “flood of filth”. Then, in stage 2 of the firewall, each viewing of one of the porn channels requires the viewer to enter a PIN code. A parent could change this code every day, if they so choose. What this firewall adds up to is that, if Jenny or Johnny end up watching any porn on TopTV, it’s the fault of the parents, not of TopTV.

Naidoo might of course say that this shouldn’t be broadcast even to parents (or adults). For consistency’s sake (although I’m not sure if he’s familiar with that concept), he might also have to say that there can be no violence on TV. There should certainly be no booze on TV – and perhaps there should be no cars on TV, seeing as those can also be used irresponsibly. But none of this really matters to Naidoo and his ilk, seeing as personal choice needs to make way for his fascist world of obedience to the dictates of God. Well, not your god, perhaps, but the one that he insists you believe in. You know, the homophobic one.

He also says that these parental controls aren’t sufficient because:

Despite TopTV’s assurances of parental controls, it will not stop sexually depraved adults from sexually abusing women and children. The majority of the 55 000 rapes of women & sexual abuse of 25 000 children in SA every year, are perpetrated by TopTV’s target market – adult men!

He’s right. TopTV’s parental controls won’t stop sexual abuse, because we’ve got no reason to believe that a) TopTV’s porn will cause their target market to want to go out and rape women or children, and b) all these people already have access to porn, for god’s sake. In the course of his “research”, surely Errol has come across porn that would make whatever PlayboyTV provides look like scenes of Bambi running through a forest?

Naidoo closes his December 8 newsletter with this:

I appeal to you to urgently write to TopTV CEO, Vino Govender and inform him that you will stop paying your subscription fees, cancel your contract or support a targeted boycott of TopTV advertisers if he launches his proposed porn channels in South Africa.

Email Vino Govender at acidrais@toptv.co.za and copy in Melinda Connor at mconnor@toptv.co.za

Christian consumers stopped Multichoice from launching a 24 hour porn channel on DStv last year. You and I can do it again! Christian citizens must stand up and do what is right!

Before you take a well-deserved holiday with your family – please consider the families that will suffer because of TopTV’s greed. Please encourage your family & friends to write today!

PS: Please forward this email to your family & friends and NOT TopTV [my emphasis]. Please also join us on the official FPI Facebook page for more updates and info about TopTV’s evil agenda.

Perhaps he doesn’t want TopTV to have advance warning of the tsunami of self-righteousness heading their way. I don’t know. But there’s the CEO’s email address. Feel free to write to him to express your support for freedom of choice. Or to say that, even though you don’t like porn yourself, you commend him for his efforts to ensure that it reaches only it’s target market, rather than innocent bystanders. And if you want to mail the other public protector, Errol Naidoo, you can do so here: enaidoo@familypolicyinstitute.com

The primary function of a trial is to find out who is guilty of what, and to establish an appropriate sanction for that crime. Justifying the sanction chosen has traditionally involved either the belief that punishment could reform or rehabilitate offenders, or the notion that retribution is an appropriate disincentivising signal of how society condemns the criminal act in question.

Retribution and rehabilitation aren’t mutually exclusive, and nor is an introductory paragraph sufficient to explore the complexities of either of these justifications. I mention them simply to point out that a third function of the trial process seems to be finding favour, especially in cases of crimes involving the ‘occult’, defined here as cases in which defendants allege that God or Satan or the Tooth Fairy made them do it.

That third function involves neither retribution nor rehabilitation, but an apparent desire for a grand psychological narrative – a classic tale of confusion, deception and perhaps betrayal, if not some sort of epic drama where reality mimics the fantastic and fictional worlds of swords and sorcery. Instead of asking more straightforward questions of motive, this inclines us to view the criminal as also part victim, and to enquire after the manner in which they were confused or traumatised.

There have recently been a number of South African cases in which the criminal’s agency is brought into question via these deus ex machina devices which can serve to create the impression of diminished responsibility – and therefore play a part in motivating for diminished sentences while providing rich entertainment for the newspaper reader.

The Lotter trial is the most recent example – having “all the elements of a bestselling crime novel” according to TimesLive. Nicolette and Hardus Lotter killed their parents because God told them to, and not because they were looking for early access to their inheritance. But the simple claim that “God told me to murder my parents” lacks the requisite narrative richness to persuade a judge of diminished responsibility, so let’s add the ‘third son of God” to the mix, along with Harry Potter.

The third son of God is Mathew Naidoo, who persuaded the Lotter offspring that their father was a philandering Satanist. We haven’t yet been told who the second son is, but perhaps this detail will come to light later. The mother’s only crimes seem to have been having married for money alone, and to have been scouting around for men to have affairs with. You’d think that she’d at least be capable of salvation under those circumstances, rather than deserving to have Hardus attack her with a stun gun, punch her a little, and then sit on her for 15 minutes before Nicolette stabbed her repeatedly.

The domestic worker seems far more evil than the mother, yet she escaped any divinely-mandated punishment. As Nicolette puts it, “When you look at Harry Potter movies, some things are negative and some things are positive, and what I was experiencing was something negative” – and an example of a less controversial statement is difficult to find, unless you’re of the view that none of the Harry Potter movies to date have any redeeming features whatsoever.

Thanks to the education in evil obtained from these movies, Nicolette was able to discern that when the domestic worker retrieved hair from the drain, this was not part of a cleaning regimen at all. It was instead evidence of malign intent via witchcraft, which this particular domestic worker was known for after having arranged for a tokoloshe to repeatedly ‘spiritually rape’ Nicolette. Perhaps the tokoloshe feeds on human hair, but having only seen two Harry Potter movies, I doubt I’m qualified to assert this with any confidence.

It was Naidoo who came along and saved Nicolette from these trials, after her visits to eight different churches had no effect. He spoke to her in the voices of angels and demons, punched her in the face after she drank two shooters (the court reporting seems to indicate that Nicolette thought this was merited, because as a servant of God, she should not be consuming alcohol), but more importantly, he made the spiritual violations end.

A notable absentee from this trial to date is Kobus Jonker, who founded the Occult-Related Crime Unit in the South African Police Service in 1992. Since then, he’s made a living pretending that there is something metaphysical going on when confused people do bad things involving candles, goats, swords or anything generally considered “occult”. But we have heard from Pastor Leon van Assenderp, testifying in support of the Lotter’s plea of not guilty on the grounds that Naidoo made them commit the murders.

Van Assenderp has testified that the Lotters showed clear signs of demonic possession, and that they were in the early stages of an occultic movement with Naidoo as inspiration and ringleader. If the early stages are what it takes to get you to kill your parents, the later stages must be truly terrifying. But regardless of how likely it is that the Lotters believe this narrative – and regardless of the extent to which Naidoo does compared to the possibility that he was simply manipulating them – it’s entirely unclear what the role of this testimony is in court.

If our courts are going to take possession seriously as a hypothesis in criminal trials, they could at least require for it to be evidenced. If it’s true, as van Assenderp attests, that when they prayed for Naidoo, he “fell to the floor… We see this many times, but he fell forward. That doesn’t happen often. He had twists and turns. We observed that he was bound by some evil force”, then surely the judge needs to see this for himself? In other words, why is hearsay evidence involving ghostbusters being entertained in the first instance?

Part of the explanation is perhaps that the courts – as well as the public – love the narrative, and that all of us want to find some way to make the case for diminished responsibility on the part of the Lotters. If they can commit such a crime through no (or less) fault of their own, perhaps we can gain more sympathy when we do something wrong. But more likely, I’d suggest, is the possibility that the Lotters are confused or even somewhat insane – or that they and Naidoo simply colluded to gain access to the parents’ estate.

None of those possibilities are clarified by the sort of evidence provided by a van Assenderp, nor by the Potter-esque level of detail provided about the so-called occultic aspects of this case. When an accused suggests some mysterious cause for their crime, our response should not be to find some equally mysterious expert to offer evidence.

The outcome of entertaining this sort of evidence is quite simply to subvert the meaning of causality, where instead of pursuing the usual questions relating to motive, and focusing on testing the most plausible hypotheses, our guardians of the law act just as irrationally as some of those that appear before them.

It’s obvious that how we live (our actions, in other words) is all that others can see, and all about us that affects them in any perceptible way. It’s also obvious that how we live is highly significant to our own welfare – you can make more or less risky choices, you can offend rather than placate, you can take homeopathic remedies instead of medicine.

But Gray’s argument goes further than those obvious truths. He uses this notion of our beliefs mattering to set up a straw man version of atheism, in which atheists (in particular ‘new atheists’) are guilty of the following:

The idea that religions are essentially creeds, lists of propositions that you have to accept, doesn’t come from religion. It’s an inheritance from Greek philosophy, which shaped much of Western Christianity and led to practitioners trying to defend their way of life as an expression of what they believe.

This is where Frazer and the new atheists today come in. When they attack religion they are assuming that religion is what this Western tradition says it is – a body of beliefs that needs to be given a rational justification.

And yes, it is again (partly) true that atheists are dumbfounded by the strange things some religious folk say that they believe – and that some of these beliefs don’t really shape what you do in any way that should concern others. If your tradition involves the ritual of praying 5 times before breakfast, I don’t care, so long as you get to work on time.

However, the beliefs of the religious often go further than that. They are used to justify tax exemptions, removing a source of income from the state which could be deployed in other ways. They are used to shield paedophiles, on the basis of a belief that a man in a robe has some unique access to truth, and is allowed to enjoy and confer relative immunity from ordinary legal processes. Beliefs mattered for children like Kara, who died because her parents prayed instead of taking her to hospital.

Non-religious belief also matters, and can also kill when parents believe in the healing powers of sugar water over medicine. More trivially, our beliefs can cause us to waste money on things like PowerBalance bracelets or vitamin concoctions, and can allow opportunity for ghouls like John Edward to exploit our grief.

We’ve heard this accommodationist claptrap before, most notably from Karen Armstrong, who seems to want us to believe that every religion is some sort of social club, united by nothing significant in terms of actual propositional content. I’d really love to hear the response from a Mullah if I were Muslim, and were to tell him that Allah is an optional extra. On second thoughts, perhaps not, seeing as I might well end up dead, depending on which part of the world this happened in.

Of course some atheists are guilty of caricaturing religion. But whether they do or not does not affect an entirely separate argument, which is that we should be committed to holding true beliefs – especially when those beliefs affect what we do (oftentimes to others). If all religious folk held their strange views, but never acted on the basis of them, we (atheists) would care far less – but they don’t stop there. At least, many of them don’t.

Saying that actions matter more than belief is an intellectually bankrupt cop-out, which refuses to acknowledge that some actions are only possible via particular beliefs, and that challenging those beliefs – and the widespread social tolerance of them – is an essential part of the strategy for eliminating those actions.

Other responses:

• Jerry Coyne
• Ophelia Benson
• PZ Myers

While I intended this column to be a follow-up on my thoughts on Slutwalk, dealing more generally with the topic of gendered epithets and why they are generally wrong, that will have to wait. Because as a colleague put it, I have ‘no infrastructure’ following a recent double-dip round of burglaries, and more than a tablet computer is required for the research needed to do that topic justice.

Instead, it is justice that I’d like to briefly focus on – or rather, the personification of it in the form of Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng. It is of course debatable whether Mogoeng personifies justice at all. Or at least, the version of justice some South Africans would like to see having a voice on the Constitutional Court, never mind as Chief Justice.

Others have written extensively about Mogoeng’s limited track record and his unwillingness or inability to explain his judgements. And while these are matters of legitimate concern, they don’t preclude his being (or becoming) an excellent Chief Justice. What might well do so, however, is the conservatism and homophobia that can be detected in some of his previous judgements.

There is a distinct danger that he would be unable to separate his faith from his duties as a jurist. It is difficult to trust that a Chief Justice who believes that homosexuality is a sickness that can be cured will think through cases involving sexual preference with anything resembling objectivity. His existing rulings in cases of rape also appear to give undue favour to the interests and excuses of men over those of women.

And then, of course, there are the rulings in cases of child rape, which initially appear quite shocking. Last week, a Tweet of mine observed “So, committing rape not so bad if you’re under-educated, poor or gentle with your victim. Am I getting this right?” – because that is certainly the impression you get when reading Mogoeng’s justifications for reducing the sentences of two men found guilty of raping children.

Then I was reminded by James Myburgh that the default sentence is life, and that you have to say something to justify a lesser sentence. Of course, we could now debate as to whether a lesser sentence is ever justified, but the point is simply that whatever one says in justifying a lesser sentence perhaps cannot help but appear callous, and often reprehensible.

Despite these concerns, one can perhaps still make the case that Mogoeng has done nothing to indicate that he has beliefs that contradict the Constitution, and which thereby make him unfit for the office he has been nominated for. But this, I think, would miss the point and not see the motivation behind my opposition to his candidacy.

Mogoeng, if confirmed, will be Chief Justice of a country with a substantial population of poor people. He will be Chief Justice in a country with obscenely high numbers of reported rapes, and one shudders to think of what the true figure might be. Some of these rapes are ‘corrective’ – in other words motivated by the same beliefs that he holds, but enacted through violence rather than prayer.

This is only part of the context in which this nomination plays out, of course. One could say much more on this nomination: You could perhaps speak of Jon Qwelane, a homophobe deployed as ambassador to Uganda – a country where legislation calling for the execution of homosexuals was seriously considered. Or about that man who nominated him, one JG Zuma, who once told us “when I was growing up an ungqingili (a gay) would not have stood in front of me. I would knock him out”.

On rape, you could observe the possible symmetry between a jurist who seems to hold the view that marital rape is impossible and a President who seems to think a kanga means yes – in both cases, the volition of one party (always the woman) is completely elided, with the judgement of the other (always men) given preference.

And finally, one could of course protest the fact that – in the context of this poor country we live in – it could be construed as offensive that Mogoeng’s church, and presumably the man himself, subscribe to a gospel of prosperity, where your pastor makes lots of money telling you that the route to financial freedom is through more prayer (accompanied, of course, by appropriate tithes). God doesn’t want you to be gay, but he certainly wants you to be rich –just like Bishop David Oyedepo (the head of Mogoeng’s church), Nigeria’s billionaire evangelist.

In light of these sorts of factors, a response such as the one attracted by the Mail & Guardian editorial of August 19, penned by Mac Maharaj, merits anger even more than disbelief. Yes, it is true that we cannot “treat [Mogoeng’s] beliefs and practices … as disqualifications, except when a specific belief or practice conflicts with other provisions of the Bill of Rights”. But perhaps we shouldn’t be in a position to feel motivated to do so in the first place.

Maharaj goes on to say that “you poison your pen when you take elements that are part of the warp and weave of our diverse society and turn them into swear words”. This is really the point, although not the one intended by Maharaj’s sly attempt to deflect attention onto the M&G: There is many a warp in our diverse society – and some of those warps sicken us. So don’t nominate someone to one of the highest public offices unless he shares our disgust, and is unafraid to say so.

Also read Ivo Vegter’s superb analysis of Mogoeng’s unsuitability for this position.

Having a conversation requires all the participants to be listening, but having a fruitful conversation often requires something more: The possibility that someone will leave the exchange with their mind changed. If not that, at least with some doubt as to whether their convictions are justified. Or, perhaps more typically, the sort of conversation that simply makes you want to have more of them, just like that one.

Part of having fruitful conversations has to do with tone, the focus of last week’s column, but a second aspect is some measure of intellectual humility – in other words, allowing for the possibility that you could be wrong, even with regard to strongly held beliefs.

The types of comment we often see online, below columns and blog posts, and on discussion forums, show little evidence that the commenter has any interest in engaging with the possibility that they might be wrong. Instead, one gets the sense that some trigger word or broad concept that they are passionate about serves as an excuse to simply say the same thing they’ve said in other comments, and at countless dinner tables over the years – regardless of how germane it is to this particular column, or this particular publication.

Often, they sound angry and dismissive, as if it’s both inconceivable and infuriating that others cannot see the truth that they do. And while the conversational logjam can sometimes be broken, it’s more often the case that one party simply gives up on trying. While this is a pity, it is also perfectly understandable. None of us want to waste our time fighting lost causes, especially when the rewards are likely to be slight.

I am not intending to exonerate those that are responsible for starting these conversations. Columnists, bloggers and Tweeters can, and often do, exhibit the same sort of narrow-mindedness and intellectual arrogance. It would be unsurprising if – soon after you read this – someone leaves a comment accusing me of exactly this. I would not be able to dismiss that charge out of hand either, as much as I might like to.

We’re a work in progress, but perhaps we sometimes forget just how much work there is to be done. Perhaps we also forget about some of the tools that can help us get that work done – the abovementioned humility, something like the principle of charity, and doing one’s best to avoid prejudice and bias in interpreting the arguments of others. And, of course, a commitment to reaching the best justified conclusion, whether or not it agrees with the one you started out with.

I’ve spent the past week in Olso, at the World Humanist Congress. Here, I’ve met many people who are better people than me, at least in terms of their commitment to fairness, affirming the dignity of others and so forth. I’ve met people who have every right to be very angry, because they lost a daughter or son just three weeks ago, at the hand of someone who could see no possibility of being wrong.

These words make me uncomfortable, but I have to say that these people are inspirational. Not because they are clever, or well-read, but often because they are not, and because they know it. Or rather, because they know that they could always be better read, or more careful thinkers, or more considerate of the unintended harms their actions might cause to others.

Of course, South Africans are not in the comfortable position that Norwegians (usually) find themselves in. We have more to disagree on and more to be angry about, but we make those disagreements worse when we expect the worst of each other – when we decide, in advance, that someone has a vested interest, an immovable ideological commitment, or unshakeable malice towards us. Worse still, it sometimes seems the case that nothing can shake those preconceptions, and everything the person says is interpreted as confirming our presumptions.

This is what it is to be immune to correction or learning. This is to treat others and their opinions as intrinsically, and inescapably, inferior to you and yours. And this is to preclude any possibility of growth as people, and as a society.

I’m not arguing for Oprah’s warm and fuzzy world. There is plenty of room, and plenty of justification, for strong language and strong disagreement. At some point in a conversation, whether online or physical, it might be justified to regard your interlocutor as a troll or as wilfully obstinate. But these occasions are perhaps rarer than we think, and we are sometimes too quick to give up on trying communicating with each other.

It’s not compulsory to have an opinion on everything, and it’s not essential to always be right. And while we should try to keep each other honest, we should try to avoid doing so in a way that’s too quick to assume that our views are the obviously superior ones.

Because of course they are superior, at least to us. And this is partly why we hold that view, rather than another. It’s not always the case that we objectively believe our view to be the most justified – we sometimes present it as such simply because it is ours, because someone is threatening it, and because we think that our viewpoints define who we are.

And yes, they do, at least to some extent. But there’s something else that can contribute to defining us, and which arguably better allows the self to improve over time. Allowing oneself to be wrong, and enthusiastically hunting down the ways in which we might be wrong – rather than the ways in which we are right – might well be character traits worth paying more attention to.