Phill Woolas, Immigration Minister, saying how it is

Well, if you mean 50 years, Woolas commented:

“Disestablishment – I think it will happen because it’s the way things are going. Once you open debate about reform of the House of Lords you open up debate about the make-up of the House,” he told the newspaper.”

“It will probably take 50 years, but a modern society is multi faith.”

So who is in the way of allowing people to choose their faith or none without the state privledging one over another?

A Ministry of Justice spokeswoman said: “The Church of England is by law established as the Church in England and the Monarch is its Supreme Governor.

“The government remains committed to this position and values the establishment of the Church of England.” [BBC]

Woolas’ point – which along with a Sunday Times interview have come to haunt him in his new role as Immigration Minister – was that reform of the House of Lords was needed. Once that happens you cannot ignore the unelected Bishops of the Church of England there. Nor the role the monarch plays as head of an established church to which the majority of subjects are not actively a part of.

The reason why this is not a government priority:

The Government has reassured the Church of England that it will not embark on any move towards disestablishment unless the Church asks it to do so. With the Church bogged down in disputes over gays and women clergy, the last thing that it wants is a row over disestablishment. In Lambeth Palace and Whitehall the issue is considered political dynamite. [The Times]

It has the hallmarks of passions being stirred on all sides of the debate. The thing is that the best arguments are not on Lambeth or Westminster’s side. Citizens should be free to pursue their religious belief without having one privileged over another. The question of belief is an entirely a private matter. You do not have to believe in hell to be a member of the Church of England. That is not a question of belief but a matter of law on the statute book by parliament.

There is however a danger that rather than going ahead with disestablishment, the Labour Government will actually try to have religion encouraged in the public sphere. Sharia Law is already being practised for civil cases via Sharia Councils in Britain:

The councils do not involve themselves in criminal law or any aspects of civil law in which they would be in direct conflict with British civil codes. The vast majority of their cases cover marriage and divorce. By consent of all parties, they may also arbitrate issues of property, child custody, housing and employment disputes, though their rulings are not binding unless submitted to the civilian courts. [source]

The issue here is the nature of the consent by all parties, and whether all parties know about access to British civil codes and how to abject. This really must be stressed when you consider the number of women that may be subjected to Sharia Councils who do not speak English. By what token are we assured that they know their rights under English law?

Meanwhile the report Moral, But No Compass, backed by the Church of England suggestion is to have a Minister for Religion. As if 26 Bishops in the House of Lords was not enough representation. As one blogger commented:

the moment this minister sets foot in a church, the Muslims would demand visits to their mosques with increasingly-taller minarets, and then the Sikhs would want a visit to their shining new gurdwaras, and thence to mandirs, and viharas. And at some point the minister would have to make statements in the House about the status of Scientology, and feel obliged to celebrate Yoda’s birthday at the House of Commons with the Jedi Knight fraternity, if only to win their endorsement and votes. [Cranmer]

Hopefully the Conservative Humanist Association can ensure that the Minister for Religion idea is not one adopted as Conservative Policy – though it could be a move to gather back Anglicans feeling slighted by the Labour Government. Despite the fact that this government is very much in favour of faith based initiatives – signalling them out for special praise in the Goldsmith report.

The real reason is that the government sees the whole issue as a Gordian Knot where the monarchy, Church of England and House of Lords all intertwine. To sever one is to unravel them all, in a way that the government fears it could not control. A church that would be free to be political, rather than just a public servant. An elected head of state with executive power independent of the Cabinet. An elected House of Lords with legitimacy to take on the lower chamber more often.

It could also be one of those things that power is only ever given away when it is expedient too or the institution that has it cares not to have such exercise of authority. The political problem though remains. The issue is one that has to be advanced on a human rights front. The state cannot effectively favour all religions, nor should it use taxpayers money to privilege one over the other. Giving religious civil courts sanction to make rulings over citizens is a breach that all are the same under the law where legally unqualified people will render verdicts based on their interpretation of holy texts – which do not favour the equal treatment of people regardless of gender, and have a notion of property rights inconsistent with moder law.

The feminists should be burning Korans, and the government should be having an almighty headache over the dalliance with organised religion. Right now it bears the harlot upon it’s back – when will the beast shake itself free of the rider that feels secure debauched on the legitimacy of their union on the statue books? Some may say it would mark the end of the world, a new world order (a book on Revelation interpretations would be how many volumes?). What it should mean is the sovereignty of belief resides in the private minds of the citizens, and not a matter of the government who should protect the freedom of religion and speech by advocating those human rights values, rather than religion being able take them away and make them their own, with the complicit government allowing it’s citizens to be unequally treated in civil cases.

OTHER BLOGS:

Secularism – why it is good for us all

The conference itself was good to attend. It is a mark of our secular attitudes that the thought of killing someone for renouncing their religion would be appalling to most of us – a denial of human rights and the freedom and autonomy of people to think things for themselves.

The videos themselves can be found here, the previous blog includes Richard Dawkins at the conference. Below the comedy moment from Nick Doody. Talking about his act:

Reviewers have described my material on Islam as both “easy” and “brave”, apparently depending on whether they were offended or not. In reality, it’s neither. Easy would be writing jokes from a knee-jerk position, pandering to the racists.

Brave would be doing my act in Tehran.

You can see my laughing my head off at the pint of Stella in a crisis at 14:08 (black shirt and glasses).

OTHER BLOGS:

International Conference Council of Ex Muslims of Britain (CEMB)

Richard Dawkins on the Atlas of Creation

Teddy Bears what is in a name? A picnic outside an Embassy

Human Rights Approach

At the first conference of the CEMB, there was two things underlying the talks: that human rights require that people are protected, rather than groups or religions. The other was that political Islam is different from many other religions because it rejects the distinction between private and public aspects of modern life – and rejects the secular notion that your faith should do no harm to others. Ideas are protected by blood, whether by the death of Apostates, or threats to the life of those that speak out against Islam.

Death is not the biggest fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive — the risk to be alive and express what we really are. – Don Miguel Ruiz

In Conway Hall, where the conference took place, above the stage by the celling emblazoned on the wall is To thine Own Self Be True. In a pluralistic society that should not be difficult – where more then one idea can be accepted. A.C Grayling made the point that tolerance should not be easy, while you should not move to the point that you tolerate the intolerant. Sharia Law does not treat women and men equally before the court, and many women do not speak English – to claim that the whole process is voluntary when British law has rights for women from dividing estates to custody of children is absurd when there is in reality no access to the law of the land in Muslim communities for women.

Ahadi made the point though that how the left and the right of politics deal with this issue is wrong. The right that it is a threat to the British way of life, while on the left that different cultures need to be accommodated. In practise the question is do we want a European ideal or a human rights ideal? The dutch politician Ehsan Jami seemed to be of the former notion, requiring an end to dual citizenship with an Islamic country. As Ahadi mentioned, the debate had changed since 9/11 from foreigners as they were called to being called Muslim – even though she had renounced Islam and many refugees were escaping political Islam.

Apostasy by its nature rejects free expression – the penalty being death in some countries, though whether the Koran itself advocates such punishment is disputed. In that sense one would hope that one day those that view the afterlife as being the judgement would prevail. However Sharia Law is gaining acceptance in Muslim countries, and even in Britain is established supposedly on a voluntary basis for civil matters but legal sanction given to the outcome of cases. Sharai Law was likened to a Trojan Horse that political Islam uses to take on the apparatus of the state.

in that use of free expression we have to make the distinction that we are against Islamophobia. This is a struggle of ideology on the nature of the relationship between the state and citizens. It may be argued that the only logical consequence is that you have to allow all forms of speech to allow criticism and guard freedom, with Pooya arguing that it should unlimited, unconditional. A.C. Grayling made the point that you had to be very specific about the limitations – which namely should be on what you cannot choose as a person. For example: gender, age, race but religious belief is free game because you consciously choose that.

One video that was shown was Fitna Remade which outlines the case rather well (without the Islamophoba immigration bashing of the original documentary).

Islamic Penal Code

President Ahmadinejad has been supporting efforts to have the death penalty for Apostasy judicially sanctioned once again. Iran needs to know that the world is watching – the Islamic Penal Code would allow men to be executed for abandoning Islam, with women serving life imprisonment. The Iranian Parliament voted 196 in favour with 7 against. This goes against the existing constitution in Iran.

On one subject, however, sharia law is unequivocal: men who change their religion from Islam must be punished with death. So when the judge heard the case of Rashid’s father, he could refer to sharia and reach a straightforward decision: the death penalty. There was no procedure for appeal.

Nevertheless, in the 18 years since Hossein Soodmand’s execution, there have been no judicially sanctioned killings of apostates in Iran, although there have been many reports of disappearances and even murders. “As the number of converts from Islam grows,” notes Ms Papadouris, “apostasy has again become a serious concern for the Iranian government.” In addition to 10,000 Christian converts living in Iran, there are several hundred thousand Baha’is who are deemed apostates.

There is another factor: President Ahmadinejad. “The President didn’t initiate the law mandating the death penalty for apostates,” says Papadouris, “but he has been lobbying for it. It is an effective form of playing populist politics. The Iranian economy is doing very badly, and the country is in a mess: Ahmadinejad may be calculating that he can gain support, and deflect attention from Iran’s problems, by persecuting apostates.”

The new law is not yet in force in Iran: it requires another vote in parliament, and then the signature of the Ayatollah. But that could happen within a matter of weeks. “Or,” says Papadouris, “it could conceivably be allowed to drop, were there a powerful enough international outcry”.

Time may be running out for Rashin’s brother. She believes that the new law will be applied in an arbitrary fashion, with individuals selected for death being chosen to frighten others into submission. That is why she fears for her brother. “We just don’t know what will happen to him. We only know that if they want to kill him, they will.” [Daily Telegraph]

Ex Muslims that have renounced religion

The Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain presents its first international conference titled:

Political Islam, Sharia Law, And Civil Society

On Friday 10 October 2008 International day against the Death Penalty.

There are still ticekts available for the conference (have just purchased one for myself) which are just £10 and among the speakers are Richard Dawkins, A.C. Grayling, Hanne Stinson and Keith Porteous Wood.

More on the event can be found here.

If you are going give a shout.

It is not only Hollywood celebrities that are accused of hurting people’s sensibilities when it comes to religion (Natalie Portman). Pat Condell, a comedian who has been featured on Richard Dawkins Website, had his video on Sharia Law flagged by users and complained about by Muslim Groups when posted on 30 September. YouTube have reinstated the video stating:

“YouTube is a platform for expression of all kinds. Our Community Guidelines prohibit speech that promotes or encourages hatred or violence towards certain groups or individuals, and the video was flagged by our community on that basis. Upon further review of the context of Pat Condell’s comments, we’ve reinstated it.”

Richard Dawkins welcomed the decision:

I congratulate YouTube on an excellent decision. Pat Condell is hard-hitting, but always quietly reasonable in tone. That some people say they are ‘offended’ by something is never a good reason for censoring it. Incitement to violence is. Pat Condell never incites violence against anybody. He always signs off with “Peace” and he means it.

Freedom of speech can not be limited based solely on people saying they are offended. There is a huge difference between not respecting ideas and inciting hatred and violence towards people. That distinction needs to be kept in mind and free citizens need to be vigilant against that distinction being eroded at the cost of all  our civil liberties.

Here is the video:

Sign the Petition: Stop Islamic Sharia Law being used in Great Britain

10 Downing Street Petition Stop Sharia Law

[N.B. Only British Citizens can sign these petitions - the first one runs out today; the second one 1 January 2009 - thanks to Stephen Gash for comment]

OTHER BLOGS:

Archbishop up holds Sharia Law in England – a critique of what he said

The circular argument – the con artist (features Pat Condell video on atheism at bottom)

It seems that not content with trying to deal with a fractious Anglican world community that Rowan Williams, the current Archbishop of Canterbury, has given a lecture talking about religious rights within a secular state. The title of the first lecture given on the 7 February was “Islam in English Law: Civil and Religious Law in England” which can be read here. What follows is my response which is important to those that think the Church of England is a benign organisation – because in the lecture Williams challenges and threatens the secular state, enlightenment values, and the separation of public and private spheres of religion. This lecture has thankfully been condemned by all parties in the UK Parliament.

In the lecture Williams is keen to suggest that there needs to be an accommodation between State law and religious law:

Even when some of the more dramatic fears are set aside, there remains a great deal of uncertainty about what degree of accommodation the law of the land can and should give to minority communities with their own strongly entrenched legal and moral codes. (Page 1)

Yet Sharia law is about applying the will of Allah as it applies to human affairs. How should the state examine what claims divine providence in rulings regarding marriage and financial arrangements? There can be in the dealings between citizens and state only one law of the land on such matters.

Williams tries to allow for a distinction between being a member of the umma and being a citizen:

There has therefore to be some concept of common good that is not prescribed solely in terms of revealed Law, however provisional or imperfect such a situation is thought to be. And this implies in turn that the Muslim, even in a predominantly Muslim state, has something of a dual identity, as citizen and as believer within the community of the faithful. (Page 2)

Yet the point is that the law, as it stands with regards to marriage and financial arrangements, is codified and enforceable irrespective of the religion or none of the parties concerned. The secular government does not see religious courts as a threat to its monopoly. Rather there can be no different laws in operation for different citizens based on what particular super natural deity they believe or do not believe in. It is the opportunity for unfairness and unequal treatment.Without apparent irony Williams tries to use that argument about how one law of the land makes it unfair to people of religious belief:

In general, when there is a robust affirmation that the law of the land should protect individuals on the grounds of their corporate religious identity and secure their freedom to fulfil religious duties, a number of queries are regularly raised. (Page 3)

When there are marriage difficulties, and a matter needs resolving, why does Sharia Law need to be enacted between the two parties? The law is clear about the legal rights and obligations. That there may be an Islamic way does not need to have the force of law – the secular state is only concerned that the law is not broken with regard to the rights of both parties. These rights are given to all citizens and the law enforced on all – there is no special disposition necessary, and Williams fails to show why there needs to be, let alone that British Law should recognise religious law as on a par with it or to run alongside it.The issue becomes whose religious law and interpretation counts, and why the law of the land on an issue should take a back seat because the clergy of a religion wish it to in such matters. What is it that Williams wants – there is no injustice being done here, though it seems that the Catholic adoption agencies not having an opt out on giving children to gay couples is a sensibility and conscience that he wants taken into account (page 1).

It therefore looks like Williams is after allies in a stand off between the secular state and religious faith.  They make strange bed fellows, as the actress said to the bishop. Why does the secular lawyer need to be sensitive with the interpretation of the law to a religious group? Why would he have to look to the authority of a religious body when also looking at the authority of the law?

The secular lawyer needs to know where the potential conflict is real, legally and religiously serious, and where it is grounded in either nuisance or ignorance. (Page 4)

It only amounts to whether religious views of human affairs need to be taken into account on a par, above or below the rule of law. The archbishop makes no way of knowing how this could be enacted. He does note the problem:

The problem here is that recognising the authority of a communal religious court to decide finally and authoritatively about such a question would in effect not merely allow an additional layer of legal routes for resolving conflicts and ordering behaviour but would actually deprive members of the minority community of rights and liberties that they were entitled to enjoy as citizens; and while a legal system might properly admit structures or protocols that embody the diversity of moral reasoning in a plural society by allowing scope for a minority group to administer its affairs according to its own convictions, it can hardly admit or ‘license’ protocols that effectively take away the rights it acknowledges as generally valid. (Page 4)

The answer is simple my Lord Bishop – do not give religious law legal force. There is a reason why the law book of England is not the Bible. The law has developed based on tradition, culture, legal practise and Parliamentary Democracy within a liberal pluralist political system. Because a sub group feel passionate in their way of living does not make them a special case when it comes to temporal matters.His answer however is that the believer would have the right of appeal based on secular rights – that the jurisdiction of British law would trump Sharia law. The question then becomes why give legal weight to Sharia Law which under certain circumstances could be superseded? It becomes not only a recipe for conflict and legal wrangling but is ceding the rule of law to a religious body. It is a step back to the dark ages.

Rather than helping believers and none to live together in harmony this is something that would if enacted like Williams suggests tear the nation apart. The rule of law would not apply equally. Under what circumstances would someone accept less than their full rights that secular law gives them? Do we imagine such circumstances are done out of respect for the law of Allah, or fear of the community that they live in? What Williams promotes for harden the lines that already separate towns and cities across this nation. Many Muslims are in this country because their descendants were secularists fleeing the cruel imposition of religious law. He may not be advocating it, but the principle is the same – the law of the land applies to one and all, and is not based on supposed divine text and bodies with authority to interpret the mind of God.

It is ludicrous to even suppose that anyone even knows the mind of God. Frankly no one can know the mind of God and anyone that does or claims such authority should be outside any rational discussion of how we as human beings need to coordinate and live our lives together. Next Williams will be attacking the enlightenment. Thus did the servant of God (which one I am unsure of now):

So much of our thinking in the modern world, dominated by European assumptions about universal rights, rests, surely, on the basis that the law is the law; that everyone stands before the public tribunal on exactly equal terms, so that recognition of corporate identities or, more seriously, of supplementary jurisdictions is simply incoherent if we want to preserve the great political and social advances of Western legality.There is a bit of a risk here in the way we sometimes talk about the universal vision of post-Enlightenment politics. (Page 5)

Apparently the law recognising us all as equal cannot cope with complex social realities. But then Williams makes it clear that the real battle is between the public and private sphere:

But if the reality of society is plural – as many political theorists have pointed out – this is a damagingly inadequate account of common life, in which certain kinds of affiliation are marginalised or privatised to the extent that what is produced is a ghettoised pattern of social life, in which particular sorts of interest and of reasoning are tolerated as private matters but never granted legitimacy in public as part of a continuing debate about shared goods and priorities.

But this means that we have to think a little harder about the role and rule of law in a plural society of overlapping identities. Perhaps it helps to see the universalist vision of law as guaranteeing equal accountability and access primarily in a negative rather than a positive sense – that is, to see it as a mechanism whereby any human participant in a society is protected against the loss of certain elementary liberties of self-determination and guaranteed the freedom to demand reasons for any actions on the part of others for actions and policies that infringe self-determination. (Page 6)

Williams misunderstands the political concept of pluralism. It denotes that because of overlapping membership of interest groups it should be possible for a liberal democracy to come to equilibrium in policy out comes. The private life of citizens, for example their religious belief and practises are theirs alone. They cannot be binding on other parties whether believers or not with anything like the force of law – for that is to enter into the public sphere and to have a hold on another citizen which denies them their right to liberty and to pursue their own belief system. It is the principle of the freedom of religious belief and none.The public sphere is concerned with the interaction of citizens. As such the rule of law is how people shall conduct themselves, and addresses their grievances about each other and the rights that they want enforced. As such these rights have negative and positive aspects of liberty. The Archbishop should be more careful when trying to talk about post enlightenment politics. Perhaps he should stick to faith, and even then may be the Christian one which is in his job description.

Here too is cause for concern:

I’d add in passing that this is arguably a place where more reflection is needed about the theology of law; if my analysis is right, the sort of foundation I have sketched for a universal principle of legal right requires both a certain valuation of the human as such and a conviction that the human subject is always endowed with some degree of freedom over against any and every actual system of human social life; both of these things are historically rooted in Christian theology, even when they have acquired a life of their own in isolation from that theology. (Page 7)

What we have here is effectively Williams suggesting that freedom means that people can appeal beyond the law of the land to a higher power – namely God. Sharia Law represents the mind of Allah Williams tells us early in his lecture. The consequences is that if you believe that God calls for you to do something then you may have a freedom given by God that no human society can take away from you. This is probably how the Taliban feel in Afghanistan.The Archbishop is talking about multiculturalism, all be it is a very narrow spectrum of things:

it might be possible to think in terms of what she calls ‘transformative accommodation’: a scheme in which individuals retain the liberty to choose the jurisdiction under which they will seek to resolve certain carefully specified matters, so that ‘power-holders are forced to compete for the loyalty of their shared constituents’ (122). This may include aspects of marital law, the regulation of financial transactions and authorised structures of mediation and conflict resolution – the main areas that have been in question where supplementary jurisdictions have been tried, with native American communities in Canada as well as with religious groups like Islamic minority communities in certain contexts. In such schemes, both jurisdictional stakeholders may need to examine the way they operate; a communal/religious nomos, to borrow Shachar’s vocabulary, has to think through the risks of alienating its people by inflexible or over-restrictive applications of traditional law, and a universalist Enlightenment system has to weigh the possible consequences of ghettoising and effectively disenfranchising a minority, at real cost to overall social cohesion and creativity. Hence ‘transformative accommodation’: both jurisdictional parties may be changed by their encounter over time, and we avoid the sterility of mutually exclusive monopolies. (Page 7-8)

The question though is why another law on issues covered by existing law should be given precedence? One must remember that this is not a tribe or nation that we have invaded and we are putting illegitimately our laws over them as conquerors. Some would uncharitably claim quite the reverse – people from another culture and tradition have come to our shores and demand that our rules should not take precedence over what they believe is better. Williams would like them to appeal to our laws should they wish. A sort of pick and mix of laws to go with the modern religious menu a la carte of what part of the faith you believe or do not believe.

I can think of no better reason than this lecture to show why theologians should be kept out of the legislative chamber. For the sake of the law of the land giving justice as fairness to all let the unelected Bishops go from the Upper Chamber of Parliament if this is the way they think!