Religion is a Diversity Issue
Equality and Diversity issues in Higher Education have been very prominent in the media recently, though usually in the context of gender. A recent article in the Times Higher urges academics to include religion as a diversity issue, which prompted me to make a few comments here. Then my attention was drawn to the following Code of Conduct for lecturers at the forthcoming STFC Summer School for new Astronomy PhD students. I’m one of the invited speakers, actually:
I gather that there are some who find the inclusion of “religion” to be somehow inappropriate…
Before I go on I should declare that I am an atheist and a secularist. I’m a paid-up member of the National Secular Society, in fact. That means that I’m in favour of the removal of religious privilege from all aspects of the government of this country. What it does not mean is that I think I know all the answers. I may be an atheis, but I am not a fundamentalist like Richard Dawkins. In fact, I think Dawkins does more harm than good to secularism.
People far cleverer than me – including many of my colleagues in astrophysics and cosmology – are deeply religious and I don’t respect them any the less for that. I may not understand their beliefs, but I respect their right to hold them. I don’t delude myself into thinking that everything that I think do or say is perfectly rational, so I don’t judge people whose beliefs I find hard to comprehend.
Sir Isaac Newton was a great scientist, but he was also a deeply religious man who also dabbled in alchemy and other forms of magic. Science may have displaced some of the more esoteric parts of Newton’s belief-system, but it hasn’t banished the magic of our Universe. It just describes it better.
I believe in free speech. As a consequence, I do not believe that it should be illegal or unlawful to say things that insult a religion. I have myself made jokes about religion, e.g. on Twitter, that some have found offensive. I have also mocked the bigotry and hypocrisy which seems to me all too frequently associated with certain types of religious belief. And those who use religion as a pretext for racism, homophobia or gender discrimination. But that’s not the same as poking fun at someone just because they have a religious beleief.
Although I don’t think such things should ever be made unlawful – there is too much law about this already – there are circumstances in which such things should not be said. This seems to be an aspect of free speech that people get very wound up about. If you don’t say what you’re thinking then surely that’s cowardly “self-censorship”? No. In everyday life there are countless situations in which things are better left unsaid. We make such decisions all the time. That’s not about cowardice, unless you hold your tongue just because you’re frightened of making waves. There can be many reasons for discretion including, and these certainly apply in the context of the Summer School, professionalism and respect for your audience. Just because you can say something doesn’t always mean you should.
So I think it’s perfectly appropriate to have a Code of Conduct to remind speakers that they should refrain from making “offensive verbal comments” related to religion (or the other things listed). I welcome it, in fact. Religion is a diversity issue, in science as it is everywhere else.
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In the Dark 
June 22, 2015 at 8:30 pm
I agree with your penultimate paragraph in particular. Not everything that is wrong should be illegal. For instance, I have no wish to draw cartoons of Muhammad (even in support of free speech), but every wish to live in a country where it is legal to.
“The STFC Introductory Summer School will be a harassment-free environment for everyone, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, nationality, religion.”
Regulations like that do tend to suggest the challenge of constructing a joke that breaks them optimally…
June 22, 2015 at 8:32 pm
Just don’t make any jokes about the Welsh..
June 22, 2015 at 9:01 pm
Ps. I will of course do my Midlands jokes..
June 22, 2015 at 9:05 pm
They’re supposed to be funny?
June 22, 2015 at 9:04 pm
I approve of the guidance provided by the STFC.
Curiously, I cannot recall seeing any guidance about appropriate conduct in all the time I worked in universities, despite teaching students in a number of institutions. There was occasionally guidance about how to handle students suffering from problems, but nothing about appropriate or inappropriate conduct. The absence puzzled me.
June 22, 2015 at 9:19 pm
It does raise the question of what is a religion. Like any belief system, secular humanism is based on tenets that are held by faith and cannot be derived using reason from anything deeper; for if it could then those deeper tenets would be the faith; and so on. An infinite regress is preventable only by a declaration of faith.
So, is a religion a set of propositions that its followers assert were stated by a god, ie a powerful spirit being (perhaps inhabiting a human body)? No, for there are some belief systems that are commonly called religions which are nontheistic.
June 23, 2015 at 6:32 am
Indeed. Is atheism a religion?
June 23, 2015 at 9:52 am
No; you can’t construct anything on the proposition “there is no god”. But atheists in practice also believe other things, and necessarily believe them by faith (see my infinite regress argument).
June 23, 2015 at 9:59 am
Sure Phillip, if you define religion as drivel in your first sentence then it’s not too hard to conclude it in your last.
June 23, 2015 at 10:52 am
Secularism IS a faith, but creationism is drivel.
June 23, 2015 at 11:31 am
Is there a religion called drivelism?
June 23, 2015 at 12:13 pm
Any sentence saying someone has faith is incomplete unless what the faith is in is specified or understood.
June 23, 2015 at 6:23 pm
“Is there a religion called drivelism?”
I don’t know, but if so then it would be drivel.
June 25, 2015 at 4:36 pm
According to the One True Wikipedia:
I suspect most people including atheists have something that could be defined that way, though in my case I’m not sure of the “organized” bit…
June 22, 2015 at 10:04 pm
Peter, I’d consider myself to be more or less aligned with Dawkins on this topic and think perhaps you treat him unfairly by describing him as fundamentalist.
“Religion is a diversity issue, in science as it is everywhere else.”
Everybody should be allowed to believe just exactly what they want to believe and in this sense I agree with this sentence and with the spirit of your blog post. The thing that winds me up (and perhaps Richard Dawkins) is when the actions on the basis of those beliefs harm other people or perturb their right to do what they themselves want to do with their own freedoms. Then I’m afraid your beliefs need some sort of rational justification for my respect, or otherwise keep it entirely to yourself, thank you very much – I’m sure you’d agree with this no?
After all there really is no “religion” but individual ideas with or without real behavioural consequences – replace the word “Religion” with “belief in the merits of honour killing” in the sentence quoted above and you’ll pretty much understand my view on religion. It’s all fun and games until it’s really just not.
Re your point about your clever colleagues – of course you respect their right to hold whatever beliefs they hold – just as I do. But just how silly would their beliefs have to be for you to challenge them? Sometimes the morally right thing to do is to challenge other people’s beliefs. It’s not about thinking you “know all the answers” as you put it or “thinking you’re perfectly rational” but acknowledging that we have come so far and we at least know some answers i.e. not knowing everything does not mean knowing nothing.
Of course there’s a time and a place and I’m not suggesting that anybody should become that guy who relentlessly berates their friends/colleagues/fellow bus passengers about how utterly moronic they are for believing in the ancient healing power of crystals. Please don’t anybody be that guy. That guy can get stuffed.
June 22, 2015 at 10:57 pm
Dawkins does a great job for theists like myself, as his stridency is offputting. The key to understanding him is that he is a controversialist; he was a controversialist in his own field of evolutionary biology with his Selfish Gene approach long before he began ranting about other things.
June 24, 2015 at 10:46 am
“Dawkins does a great job for theists like myself, as his stridency is offputting.”
Surely you don’t mean this? If you believe that Dawkins makes bad arguments against theism then his bad arguments are his undoing – not his stridency. The only reason you’d have for being thankful for his “offputting” tone is if you thought Dawkins was talking too much sense but you’d rather people didn’t hear it.
I guess Einstein was something of a ranting controversialist when he used to storm on and on about GR?
June 24, 2015 at 11:59 am
Some of his points about religion are good, some are bad, but I’m talking about his personality, and it is not the same as Einstein’s.
June 23, 2015 at 12:15 am
“Peter, I’d consider myself to be more or less aligned with Dawkins on this topic and think perhaps you treat him unfairly by describing him as fundamentalist.”
Yes, it’s just an incantation that scientists feel the need to say, based on the 4% of things where they’d disagree with him.
June 23, 2015 at 12:30 am
I agree with the vast majority of this post.
June 23, 2015 at 6:37 am
Sadly, there is no reference to pogonophobia in the Code of Conduct. The Beard Liberation Front has been informed.
June 25, 2015 at 7:03 am
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June 25, 2015 at 11:38 am
I don’t think Creationism is a religion, at least it purports to be a scientific theory – and as such has been refuted many times. I wouldn’t have any problem commenting on creationism from that point of view.
As for gender segregation, that would be incompatible with the code of conduct on sexual discrimination.
June 25, 2015 at 12:43 pm
“As for gender segregation, that would be incompatible with the code of conduct on sexual discrimination.”
Exactly. This is another key example of where religious faith is fundamentally incompatible with a diversity and equality agenda.
June 25, 2015 at 12:55 pm
It is an example of one aspect of one religion being incompatible with equality and diversity…
June 25, 2015 at 12:56 pm
@telescoper (June 25 2015, 12:55 pm)
It is an example of one aspect of one religion being incompatible with equality and diversity…
Oh, I think that we can do some fairly sound inductive reasoning here…
June 25, 2015 at 1:56 pm
Not all religions require gender segregation, and not all gender segregation is on religious grounds.
June 25, 2015 at 3:30 pm
Sorry, I was perhaps a little unclear because I had to rush off to my son’s sports day at school.
My point, as I say here is that religion is, by its very nature, always going to be tribal and divisive. (Faith A reckons that their god is The One, whereas Faith B is similarly adamant that their god is the one true deity. (And that’s before we start on Sub-Faith A.1.ii and how their particular tenets and ideologies are in contest with Sub-Faith A.1.iii…))
If it really were just “one aspect of one religion”, as you suggest, which was driving divisions and bigotry that’d be bad enough. After all, billions of people subscribe to these myths. But it’s not. As I say in that post, religion has a very bad track record in promoting inclusivity.
June 25, 2015 at 3:58 pm
What matters to soclety about a religion is not its truth-claim but how it instructs its adherents to treat others.
June 25, 2015 at 3:58 pm
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