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Alternative Facts

Wendy M. Grossman
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Alternative Facts

“WE HAVE BEEN FIGHTING ‘alternative facts’ for decades, haven’t we?” a fellow long-serving skeptic said recently.

Indeed we have, even though it never occurred to either us or the people whose “facts” we disputed to call them that. The things we as skeptics have talked about for so long are suddenly mainstream concerns: why do people believe these things? Or, as Chico Marx (confusingly, dressed as Groucho) put it in Duck Soup, “Who you gonna believe – me, or your own eyes?”

The term, for those who have been avoiding the news lately (and who can blame you?), came from Kellyanne Conway, a senior advisor to US president Donald Trump. The newly appointed White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, following Trump’s lead, had claimed in his first White House press conference that Trump had drawn the largest-ever audience for an inauguration. Pesky things, photographs: they told a different story. So the host of NBC’s Meet the Press asked Conway: what about it? And she said: “Our press secretary gave alternative facts”.

Pesky things, news hosts; this one – Chuck Todd – responded, “Alternative facts aren’t facts; they’re falsehoods”. Later in the interview, Todd tried again to ask Conway why Spicer had said it. “Think about what you just said to your viewers. That’s why we feel compelled to go out and clear the air and put alternative facts out there.” Um…huh?

Conway here seems to be channelling a different movie character, Slick Henderson, in 1988’s Baja Oklahoma, who, having claimed to have spent the night in a hammock that his wife informed him had been taken down weeks before, said: “Well. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.”

Besides this institutional embrace of falsehoods, the election – and the EU referendum in this country – has inspired much concern about “fake news”. These are stories whose writers and promulgators care only whether they get advertising revenue-producing clicks and not whether there is any truth behind them. In the history of media, this approach really isn’t at all new; it’s the business model many tabloids were built on, from the National Enquirer (in the US) to the deceased Sunday Sport in the UK. Similarly, much of the kind of abuse people complain about on Twitter is the democratisation of the kinds of attacks frequently seen in the Daily Mail or any part of the Murdoch press. Questionable facts are the bedrock on which Fox News – “fair and balanced” – is built. This is not just about rogue sites and the village of Macedonian teenagers who’ve found writing shock-click stories a way to make some nice cash.

As the veteran journalist Walt Mossberg has written at the site he co-founded, The Verge, the fundamental problem is that the business model supporting commercial journalism creates no incentives that favour publishing truth. Since the election, a campaign called Sleeping Giants has been notifying major advertisers when their ads appear on the alt-right site Breitbart; more than 800 have now blocked their ads from appearing on the site. It’s apparently a polite campaign. I’ve even done similar things in the past myself, pointing out ads selling term paper writing services and even shadier organisations to publications in order to stop their appearance. It’s still uncomfortable, in that similar campaigns have often been used in the past to push censorship agendas, most notably Hollywood’s Hays Code.

Many of the habits of human psychology that Chris French so often talks about to explain why people believe what they do are important factors here. In particular, confirmation bias means people more easily believe the things that appear to support their preconceived ideas than those that are contradictory. Plus, we’re more inclined to believe the things our friends believe or that come to us through sources we and our friends trust.

The trouble with all this fine analysis – and there’s a lot of it going around – is that it’s not clear how many people believe these stories or even care if they are being told lies. You can even argue, as a friend of mine does, that although Trump promulgated many “alternative facts” on his way to the presidency, he also told a deeper truth that his more factually precise opponents typically refused to acknowledge: many people have indeed been hosed by the approach that has prevailed over the last decades.

The upshot of all this is that great danger lurks in the proposals to control the creation and spread of fake news. Yes, there are limits to free speech – shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theatre is the usual line – but it’s hard to conceive regulations that won’t be turned against the legitimate press in destructive ways. Trump has already lavelled CNN and the New York Times as purveyors of fake news. We know we don’t want a regulatory system that penalises people who are genuinely trying to serve the public interest for making honest mistakes; nor do we want a system that gives powerful people a weapon to demolish anyone who dares to poke into their secrets. The skeptics have generally not favoured censorship, and I certainly hope we aren’t going to start now because it always backfires.

Homeopathy & Witchcraft

Deborah Hyde
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Homeopathy & Witchcraft

Hubble bubble?

“Homeopathy is witchcraft” said Dr Tom Dolphin, deputy chairman of the BMA’s junior doctors committee at their annual conference in May. It seems the rest of the delegates agreed, since they passed a motion denouncing the use of alternative therapies where there was no evidence for their effectiveness.

I’m no expert on medicine or homeopathy. Witchcraft on the other hand …

Is the good doctor right? Or is he recklessly impugning homeopaths? Or witches?

WHAT’S A WITCH THEN?

Let’s start with a definition of witchcraft. In ordinary English dictionaries, the terms ‘witchcraft’ and ‘sorcery’ are broadly synonymous. But in anthropological writings, there is a subtle difference: this has arisen for the historical reason that the classic work on ethnological witchcraft was done on the Azande people of north central Africa (mostly modern Congo & Sudan) by Edward Evans Pritchard.

The Azande regard witchcraft and sorcery as slightly different (as do many other non-European peoples), so the distinction was and is useful, which is why it has lasted.

Both sorcery and witchcraft involve the manipulation of supernatural forces to produce magic. Sorcery is the production of magic using self-conscious ‘formulae’ – rituals and activities. Anyone with the ritual knowledge can perform sorcery. Being a witch involves qualities more intrinsic to the person: somebody can be born a witch, and even cast their evil inadvertently (such as with the evil eye).

Broadly, you are a sorcerer by your deeds and a witch by your nature.

So sorcery is the appliance of science to the supernatural: the consistent application of objects, words and rituals to produce consistent results. In fact, ideally:

“A spell need never go wrong, unless some detail of ritual observance had been omitted or a rival magician had been practicing stronger counter-magic”

So in sorcery, there is a standardised product – not an unusual phenomenon in religion (anyone for Mass?) There is also a standardised result – expected in sorcery, but not in religion, expressed thus:

“a prayer … (is) a form of supplication: a spell (is) a mechanical means of manipulation”

ibid

USEFUL CONCEPTS

Sorcery assumes the existence of a more subtle world than we can perceive with our natural facilities, that this subtle world has influence over us and that we can transact with it. That’s not necessarily so weird. I believe in electricity even though I can’t see electrons.

Many complimentary therapies also have unproven concepts such as meridians, or chi. But that doesn’t really matter: the map is not the territory. At school, they told you that atoms were like little coloured snooker balls whizzing around other snooker balls – that isn’t quite true either.

But the difference between acupuncture meridians and ‘snooker ball’ atoms is that one is a good scientific model, and the other is a person with lines drawn on their body.

The measure of a scientific model not so much whether it describes the truth; the truth is, after all, a philosophical concept. The measure of a good scientific model is whether it can be used to consistently predict results.

Strictly speaking, sodium atoms don’t have extra red snooker balls in their outer shells, nor chlorine atoms lack blue snooker balls in their outer shell. I’m assured by better qualified people than I that it’s all a bit more complicated than that. However it’s a bloody good model, because we know what happens every time sodium and chlorine get together.

So for magic and homeopathy to be scientific, we don’t necessarily have to have yet validated their theoretical postulates. Many things remain yet to be discovered, after all. We would simply have to be convinced that their models produce consistent and predictable results.

Do they?

RESULTS

Let’s stick to homeopathy. The answer may be ‘yes’.

Homeopathy appears, in some, to offer the same kind of results that placebos do. In other words, results not beyond what can be achieved with utterly neutral substances.

Placebos are a fascinating phenomenon. They appear to invoke some kind of natural health assistance via a belief mechanism. Modern studies demonstrate that he placebo effect certainly works in some people and we even seem to have subconscious preferences about the relationship between effectiveness and potency: the colour of pills matters, as does the dosage (two pills are better than one) and whether or not the pill is branded.

The effects of the placebo’s malevolent sibling, the nocebo have also been noted as powerful from time to time, when a human target of a powerful curse obediently gives up the ghost and surrenders to their maliciously prescribed fate.

Nicholas Humphrey’s postulated ‘health management system’ proposes that natural defensive bodily functions such as vomiting or fevers are marshalled at an appropriate time to combat illness in a ‘top-down’ (from the cognitive to the subconscious/physical parts of the brain) mechanism. The triggers for the engagement of these powerful tools are, in this model, a compelling experience, such as a shamanic/religious ritual (or administration of a medicine by an authority figure such a qualified practitioner in whom you have trust).

Studies on the modern counterparts of shamanic rituals – faith-healing – have found that while the participants have subjectively felt and improvement in their conditions, that they have objectively not improved1. Furthermore, psychometric tests suggest that the participants who benefited from these rituals ‘engaged in denial and disregard of reality’2.

So what makes prescription drugs different from homeopathic medicine if homeopathic medicine also works?

The use of empirical techniques, such as randomised controlled trials (RCTs), demonstrate that prescription drugs work more than placebos. They affect something more than our natural, and distressingly moderate, ability to rally our own defences.

As fascinating as the placebo effect is, it doesn’t work on enough people or consistently enough to count as being as potent as medicine.

I started with a cussedly detailed differentiation between witchcraft and sorcery because I assumed that you, dear reader, are interested in such fine distinctions. You have, after all, visited the blog of a woman depicted on a broomstick.

But I think it has a further application in some complementary and alternative therapies.

I would say that ‘spiritual healing’ and ‘psychic healing’ bear more relation to ‘witchcraft’, in the anthropological sense. They employ the ‘intrinsic’ model of a naturally gifted practitioner.

Practices such as homeopathy and reflexology bear more relation to ‘sorcery’, in the anthropological sense. They provide for recipes or rituals, consistent with established models imparted during standardised courses of study.

But in the European sense and in day-to-day English, ‘witchcraft’ and ‘sorcery’ can pass for the same thing.

Dr. Tom Dolphin said “Homeopathy is witchcraft”

I believe he’s right.

Thank you to Tessera2009 for nagging me to write this. I’ve been a bit behind for a month or so, and wouldn’t have done it without the gentle nudge.

Footnotes:
1 ‘The Psychology of Religious Behaviour, Belief & Experience’ Beit-Hallahmi & Argyle citing Glik (1986) and Pattison et al (1973)
2 Minnesota Personality Multiphasic Inventory

A Quorum of Quacks

Deborah Hyde
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A Quorum of Quacks

For those of you who have never been festooned with so may needles that you looked like a archery target in fairyland, or else had your feet savagely mashed by a lady with a constipated grin who gaily announces: “Gall bladder a bit sluggish today” the regulation of Complimentary and Alternative Medicine may not be a pressing concern. If you wouldn’t dream of alleviating your IBS with some water that had once been exposed downwind of an igneous rock, you may wish to skip to the next blog. I can recommend several: the list is to your right.

But if CAM interests you, and especially if you’re a little sceptical, then here are some thoughts. You may have read similar elsewhere as I’m hardly the first on the scene, but I was busy washing my hair before. This entry, given that I’m supposed to write about the supernatural, probably represents a bit of mission creep. But if we’re going to talk about vampires and witches, why not talk about life-force and meridians?

As you may know, in November 2000 a House of Lords Select Committee on Science & Technology produced a report on the subject of Complimentary and Alternative Medicine in recognition of the fact that CAM was popular and probably getting more so. The purpose of the report was primarily to evaluate potential dangers to the public and secondarily to facilitate the evaluation of the evidence base, and thereby evaluate the costs/benefit ratio to the NHS. This, and a report and the Department of Health Response which followed a year later, explored the idea of regulation. There are only two Complimentary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) categories which are statutorily regulated at present: they are osteopathy and chiropractic. This means that the words are protected and that nobody can practice as an osteopath or a chiropractor without having a recognised qualification.

So since it’s such a hot current issue I thought I’d look at regulation by going through a potted history of another statutorily regulated profession – medicine.

<strong>History</strong>

In 1518, The Royal College of Physicians was created to supervise and licence physicians practicing within the City of London and its radius. Their remit was expanded to the rest of the country just five years later. What a responsibility – you think they’d have been churning out medics like bratwurst. But in the first few years, there were only a dozen or so members of the guild to attend a city of around 60,000 citizens. Seventy years later, the population had doubled to over one hundred and twenty so there were now, er, thirty-eight physicians. This veritable tide of medics had grown to forty individuals by the time of the Civil War. In these early days, the ratio was reckoned at the very best ever to be five thousand citizens to one physician.

To be fair, a natural restriction in the form of class-ism probably exerted quite a force; physicians attended to the rich, this remit being reflected in their fees which were far higher than those of the apothecaries and surgeons socially beneath them who attended to the poorer. By 1700 the apothecaries were reckoned to outnumber the physicians by five to one. In addition, midwives and folk healers operated at a local level and usually charged in kind.

So a highly-structured society had a medical care model which reflected its hierarchy. Not so peculiar. But for two things: firstly, the physicians sought vigorously to limit the practices of the other categories of medical practitioner and secondly, this without any actual better outcomes of their own. The physicians and apothecaries used different paradigms, the Greek humoural theory for physicians and the traditional herbal approach by apothecaries. This meant that the upper classes were more likely to accidentally die of bleeding and purging than the lower classes which were more likely to accidentally die of poisoning. If you were to hazard a guess at which was the more effective approach, the apothecaries would probably win out. (It’s hard to see how violent diarrhea could cure anything other than your chances on a hot date).

<strong>Protectionism</strong>

The 17th century saw a protracted legal battle in which the physicians sought to limit the powers of the apothecaries: this when they had insufficient numbers of their own to attend to the apothecaries’ patients, insufficient evidence of the superiority their own methods and were also unlikely to have adjusted their fees so that the poor could afford them. The apothecaries’ right to give medical advice (but not charge for it) was eventually upheld by the House of Lords.

In these early days there were many other attempts made at restrictive practices in the medical market – odd when you consider that the protectionist medieval guild model was changing in so many other areas. For example, licensing of quacks and midwives was supervised by ecclesiastical authorities under Henry VIII. This was probably an attempt in the sensitive era of the Reformation to regulate the scope for use of sorcery and enchantment (for which read ‘unauthorised religious models’). In a time where medical intervention was mostly ineffective, techniques often verged on the magical: for example, in 1606 The Royal College of Physicians attempted to stop one Reverend John Bell from treating high fevers by writing words on a piece of paper.

The history of the restrictive approach to medical practice is no better in the US. In the nineteenth century, the ‘regulars’ fought a series of battles with lay practitioners – again, when they were in no position to actually offer better results. The ‘regulars’ also railed against midwives, producing an adverse effect on the profession’s reputation which was apparent in the US until very recently.

At some point during the Enlightenment the medical profession started to assimilate some new ideas and by the early 20th century, there was more in a doctor’s bag than laudanum and leeches. The changes in just one century are stunning and these days I personally prefer to approach a member of the medical profession in order to receive empirically-based treatments. Homeopaths generally don’t have chemistry degrees (otherwise they’d know ‘Good Vibrations’ is just a Beach Boys song), reflexologists don’t employ phlebotomy labs and no-one has ever managed to X-ray my Chi (although perhaps I could try to donate it. Go here – it’s hilarious).

But my real point is that the statutory regulation – and the trade protectionism which accompanied it – came before the efficacy, the competence and the safety. In the same way that the Vatican certified the trade in relics and indulgences, the earliest incarnations of a now very respectable profession attempted to use their class, the law and their political clout to exclusively peddle mostly utter bollocks. Sometimes it was dangerous mostly utter bollocks.

So having looked at that, perhaps we should examine the proposition that ‘regulation as consumer protection’ may sometimes be a veil of decency worn over a shoddy, yellowing string-vest of self-interest. Which makes me wonder if we should save regulation for things that demonstrably work.

But here’s a further thought: my father has always maintained that it doesn’t matter if your car doesn’t go, but it does rather matter if it doesn’t stop. Good point. I, for one, am very grateful that the man who mends my brakes subscribes to a conventional code of practice.

So let’s refine things that demonstrably work to things that can actually do harm. Harm to your wallet and dignity doesn’t count: for one thing, the fashion industry would collapse overnight. For another, too much protection against ourselves would infantilise us beyond the ability to make any rational decisions at all. I really must reserve the right to be a common-or-garden idiot.

Actually, a recent Department of Health report is well ahead of me here. ‘Extending Professional and Occupational Regulation’ (2009) suggests that the regulation of CAM practitioners should be proportionate to risk. However some parts of the homeopathic profession are still seeking statutory regulation. Other parts are, for sound business reasons, resisting them. (Thanks to Andy from Quackometer for drawing my attention to all this).

In 2000 the House of Lords assigned homeopathy to its ‘Group 1’ – professionally organised therapies with a well-developed process of voluntary self-regulation. My worry is that, for many consumers, regulation may be regarded as approbation. In this respect, regulation can be bad. There must be many CAM bodies aware of the potential benefit to being highly structured (restricting numbers of practitioners, thereby raising fees, being just one). For this reason, I do hope that the Department of Health sticks to its guns and maintains the ‘harm’ criterion, thereby restricting the CAMs which add another layer of respectability by being statutorily regulated.

The Changing Face of Anti-Vax

Deborah Hyde
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The Changing Face of Anti-Vax

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was a very well-travelled eighteenth century aristocrat whose husband was appointed ambassador to Istanbul. Fortunately for us, she was also a prolific letter writer. Her legacy is still in print today.

Lady Montagu had been scarred badly by a bout of smallpox in her youth. She was fortunate; many who contracted smallpox at the time, like her own brother, died.

So when she found out about a Turkish procedure to safeguard against severe smallpox, she had her son treated. She went on to introduce the habit to some of the upper classes in England, the Royal children among them. This was against considerable resistance from the medical profession of the time, but I’ve written about exactly how useful they were in that era here.

‘Variolation’ is the introduction of a small quantity of the milder of the two forms of smallpox – Variola minor – into a subject. Given that the dose was tiny, that it was of the mild form of the disease and that it may have been administered via a cut in the skin (rather than by inhalation), the effect was to produce antibodies against future infection, but not the full-blown disease.

Edward Jenner later used cowpox pathogens to achieve the same result. Both of these procedures are inoculation – introduction of live pathogens – rather than vaccination which uses ‘dead’, attenuated or partial viruses.

I write ‘dead’ in quotes because I seem to remember that the concept of life as applied to viruses has some considerable philosophical encumberances. It’s fascinating, but we don’t need to worry about it for the purposes of this blogpost.

Smallpox has now been eradicated. It probably exists somewhere in a military laboratory. Let’s hope the custodians are on our side.

Major efforts are being made in polio eradication too and the fight has gone well but for several setbacks, one of which was a conspiracy epidemic in Nigeria where people thought that vaccination made girls sterile. Memes can kill.

In the UK variolation was made illegal in 1840, but that was OK because the same act of Parliament provided for a free vaccine which had been developed since Lady Montagu’s day. In 1853 vaccination of small children became mandatory, and other acts covering other classes of person came in later.

In the late 19th/early 20th century, there were get-out clauses of varying efficacy for those with conscientious objections to vaccination. But by then, they were far less likely to suffer anyway, since they would have benefited from the prophylactic effect of herd immunity – everybody else’s vaccinations.

In the USA in 1905, Jacobson vs Masachusetts reached the Supreme Court where it was determined that states had the authority to impose compulsory vaccination. Sometimes, the rights of the few must submit to the rights of the many.

Which seems to have created quite a backlash at the time. I was in New York a couple of weeks ago and went to a couple of flea markets in the Chelsea district. It’s between the old meatpacking district and Hell’s kitchen. If you don’t think that sounds too salubrious, it wasn’t. Now however, it’s been yuppified and you can buy vintage brass sconces for $275 (They were pretty, but I didn’t).

Instead, I went for a few copies of The Quest: September 1926, February and April 1927’s editions. ‘The Quest’ had been published in Brooklyn for ten cents a copy, and its mission had been ‘against compulsory vaccination and animal cruelty’.

This really was a niche publication. I’ve Googled it and have had a very hard time finding out much about the magazine or the publisher. But I can tell you that Louis S Siegfried seems to have published at least one other other anti-vax publication (Spivak, John L. The Medical Trust Unmasked: The Story of a Gigantic Conspiracy – Louis S. Siegfried,1929, 1930, 1961 – a first edition seems to go for about USD25) and may have spent some time in jail for his beliefs.

Here is an article he wrote asking ‘Is Vaccination Harmless’.

In the April 1927 pamphlet we read the case of Mrs. Carolyne Burns who refused to have her son vaccinated. The Department of Education had complained that he could not attend school. Mrs Burns said:

“I demand the right of a public school education for my boy and I can’t see why he shouldn’t get it. I object to vaccination and I won’t submit my boy to such a dangerous practice.
It is un-American and unconstitutional to force this pus into the system of a healthy child … the school won’t accept him and I won’t have him vaccinated. What can I do?”

Mrs Burns was found not guilty – although quite how, I’m not sure.

February 1927 has a page on ‘What Physicians say about VACCINATION’, opposite a page which entreats people to ‘Stop Pus Squirting’.

Page 5 covers the furore surrounding a leading article in the Lancet (September 4th and October 9th 1926?) in which a causal link was claimed between death due to encephalomyelitis (inflammation of the brain and spinal-cord) and vaccination.

It’s a fascinating piece of social history. I’ve put a couple of pdfs here so you can read if you’re interested.

The Dangers of Vaccination as Told By a Medical Doctor

Vaccination Predisposes to Other Diseases

The three oft-repeated errors in ‘The Quest’ are argument from authority (there appear to have been plenty of anti-vax doctors willing to write), confusion of correlation with causation and conspiracy theories citing vested interests who were allegedly pushing vaccines for financial gains.

Plus ca change, huh?

I’m not sure whether the vaccinations I received as a child were administered under a legal compulsion. It wouldn’t have made a difference though. My grandmother’s and mother’s generations saw whooping cough, polio and tuberculosis first hand. They couldn’t believe their luck that these conditions and others could be prevented safely and for free.

But it seems we’re now taking our good health for granted. Despite the evidence that vaccinations are safer than outbreaks, anti-vax is on the rise in a generation which has not experienced much epidemic disease.

Andrew Wakefield’s 1998 ‘Lancet’ paper drawing a link between autism and vaccination has been discredited, but large swathes of the confident middle classes – ‘over-Googled people’, as they were described to me at a US vaccination drive recently – are refusing to have their children protected.

I love vintage publications and enjoy reading the voices from history. It’s interesting to see that anti-vaxers have gone from being doctors (in Lady Montagu’s day), to anti-federal individualists, some with religious interests (early 20th century) to middle-class worriers with benzadrine-type levels of Google usage.

But wouldn’t it be nice if the anti-vax message of ‘The Quest’ wasn’t still so current?

‘Legal Name Fraud’ – The Truth? It’s hogwash

Geoff Whelan
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‘Legal Name Fraud’ – The Truth? It’s hogwash

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 26, Issue 2, from 2016.

You’ve seen the signs, they’ve certainly been cropping up all over the country. Billboards exclaiming “LEGAL NAME FRAUD, THE TRUTH, IT IS ILLEGAL TO USE A LEGAL NAME”. In fairness lawyers don’t usually buy expensive advertising space to explain the law to people, people come to us with their problems and we try our best to help them navigate what can often be a very difficult legal landscape. We wouldn’t advertise “BURGLARY, THE TRUTH, IT IS ILLEGAL TO BURGLE”.

Now I think I know what a Legal Name is (hint: your birth certificate or marriage certificate is a good start). What I was unaware of – until I read these adverts – was that it was illegal to use one… which does sound rather oxymoronic. Would I have to brace myself for the influx of people charged with illegally using a legal name? Of course the law does change all the time. Did I miss the memo outlining this new criminal offence? I thought I had better check. I couldn’t find this purported new crime in the text books, in any statutory instruments or any case law. A search of legal journals, articles and text books on Westlaw returned the following response: No documents satisfy your query.

So, perplexed, I used the next best research tool available, Google, and I was directed to legalnamefraud.net. There I entered the rabbit hole. Almost literally, in fact, as one link on the homepage unironically welcomes you to the rabbit hole – at the same time as telling the visitor how to get off driving penalties (but it’ll cost you at least $67 for an ebook). The homepage appears to be a gateway to a number of linked sites such as Truthbillboards.net, Losethename.com, Kateofgaia.wordpress.com, Phoenixisrisen.co.uk and a handful of others. Most, if not all, of which seem to be run by someone who calls herself Kate of Gaia. Apparently based in Canada, Kate is on Twitter and describes herself as a singer-songwriter, freelance journalist, researcher, writer and broadcaster at Legal Name Fraud Radio. Lawyer, she is not.

I delved deeper into her site. There I was confronted with page after page of highly detailed stream of consciousness pseudo-law peppered with Biblical references and a large dose of conspiracy theory. The gist seems to be this: once your parents sign your birth certificate they are creating a legal fiction. The name on the certificate sounds like you but it isn’t you. By signing the certificate ownership of the name passes to the Crown. The Crown therefore owns you. Using your own name without written permission from the Crown is therefore fraudulent. But – and this is the good news – you didn’t consent to this fraud (how could you, you were a baby!). Therefore any duties you owe to the Crown are null and void, their civil and criminal laws don’t apply to you and, hey presto, you have a get out of jail free card! Or something like that. Here’s a flavour of the reasoning:

“In laymen’s terms, the clausula rebis sic stantibus is the escape clause where a FUNDAMENTAL change in circumstances renders contracts/treaties etc. null and void…the fundamental change moment?… it’s illegal to be legal anything, mind, body, spirit. The original Birth Certificate contract is the PROOF and EVIDENCE of a clear and present INTENT to deceive another by it’s mere existence… registry buildings are proof of intent to foment this deception… everything created to put this fraud into practice is proof of fraud intent ab initio (since before it was ACT-DEAD upon where you are ACT-DEAD until truth is ACT-DEED… when you throw down, with force, the dead legal name (all ideas ATTACHED/attacked to it), with intent to destroy that from your reality, the real Shemitah/CRSS comes into full force and effect.”

Granted, Kate has used some Latin so it sounds superficially legal (even though it’s misspelt, it should be ‘rebus’, though that’s probably me being overly picky). She uses words such as proof, evidence and intent which admittedly are all frequently used legal terms. There the similarity to actual law ends.

Kate has published reams of this guff online. The caps lock and alliteration are red flags. This is not law. In much the same way that Deepak Chopra parroting the word quantum won’t get him a job interview at CERN, Kate of Gaia’s legal expertise is unlikely to get her appointed to the Supreme Court of any jurisdiction. What she espouses is the stock in trade of the Freemen on the Land movement. Sadly this is not some harmless crank theory. People have actually relied on this nonsense in courts in the UK, Canada and the US.

‘Freemen’ try to argue that when sued for debt they don’t actually owe money because the contracts are made in their legal name which, of course, doesn’t mean them. They try to argue that the courts don’t actually have jurisdiction over them because they haven’t consented to that jurisdiction. Their legal argument is, in effect, that they are above the law. This tends to rub actual Judges up the wrong way. As far as I’m aware, every one of these arguments have failed. In some cases those advancing them end up in jail for contempt or police obstruction. Use them in court and the case will not go well for you at all. This is what Associate Chief Justice J.D. Rooke of the Alberta Queen’s Bench had to say in a mammoth judgement deconstructing the Freemen arguments in the case of Mead v Mead: 

[672] It does not matter whether you frame your business as a joke, religion, for educational purposes only, or as not being legal advice; your business harms your naïve or malicious customers, their families, and the innocent persons whom your customers abuse as they attempt to exercise what you have told them are their rights. You cannot identify one instance where a court has rolled over and behaved as told. Not one. Your spells, when cast, fail.

So why are these billboards popping up all over the UK? That’s unclear, but one thing is for sure, many perplexed people would have been googling the “Truth” and ended up at one of Kate’s sites. Some may even have read Kate’s musings. 

However, beware of following the advice.

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 26, Number 2

A science of networks: visualising connections using Game of Thrones characters

Andrew Beveridge
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A science of networks: visualising connections using Game of Thrones characters

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 26, Issue 2, 2013

In 1623, John Donne pondered, “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” We are only realised and complete within the social fabric that unifies us. He concluded with an equally famous reflection on a funeral bell: “any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” Donne recognised that a consequence of cohesion is the propagation of the local to the global. However, he leaves a huge and mysterious gap between the reach of people’s daily lives and the vastness of his meditation. Centuries would pass before we could begin to map out even a fraction of Donne’s continent of connected humanity with some insight and clarity.

Mathematician Leonard Euler introduced the rudiments of a mathematical theory of interconnection in 1736, albeit at a much smaller scale. Locals in Königsburg (now Kaliningrad, Russia) had an unresolved curiosity: Was it possible to take a round-trip stroll that visited both banks of the Pregel River and its two islands while crossing each of the city’s seven bridges exactly once? Euler proved this stroll’s impossibility by liberating the connections from their geographic context. All that mattered was the pattern of the four places connected by seven links.

Euler’s solution marked the birth of the study of networks. A network is a collection of objects (called vertices) along with the links between them (called edges). Another two hundred years would elapse before the study of large and complex networks would emerge from the confluence of disciplines that study connection, behavior and structure.

Twentieth century interest in natural networks germinated in the social sciences before expanding to other disciplines. The field of network science has coalesced over the last two decades, catalysed by increased computational power and collaborative methodologies. Researchers have finally been able to construct, explore and analyse diverse relational systems of massive scale, including scientific, economic, social and technological networks. Unexpectedly, they discovered remarkable similarities among the resulting network architectures. Subsequent focus on these common features identified some universal laws guiding networked behavior. To illustrate this coming together of ideas, let’s sample some motifs of networked life. 

Donne’s continent of humanity was on the minds of researchers in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s as they investigated how local interconnection creates surprising large-scale properties. Psychologist Stanley Milgram explored the “small-world” hypothesis that people are connected by short (and navigable) chains of acquaintances. This idea is now known colloquially as “six degrees of separation.” Sociologist Michael Granovetter investigated the “strength of weak ties,” how looser connections between communities play a crucial role in the global percolation of influence and information. Economist Thomas Schelling formulated another network effect. He observed that dynamic processes on networks are prone to a tipping-point phenomenon, characterised by an accumulation of a critical mass followed by explosive propagation. “Going viral” seems commonplace now, but Schelling’s insight came long before posts and tweets were sparking global cascades.

This brings us to the mathematical patterns of the networks themselves. In natural large-scale networks, not all vertices are created equal. These networks contain a subset of hubs having far more connections than average. These vertices are crucial to the efficiency of the network, just as hub cities are essential for airline travel. The hubs are actually a feature of a broader pattern in the network: the number of vertices with a given number of connections obeys a natural rule of decay, called a power law. In 1999, physicists Albert-Lászlo Barabási and Réka Albert introduced a simple network formation model that adheres to this power law. Their work shows that self-reinforcing popularity is a universal ingredient to the growth process of successful real-world networks. As networks expand, “the rich get richer’, meaning that newly added vertices are more likely to attach to existing vertices of high degree.

In addition to high connection count, there are other ways in which vertices hold key positions within the network. Researchers use a variety of centrality measures to quantify various local and global properties. Some measures capture how well-positioned vertices are as connectors between disparate parts of the network. Others capture the vitality of the network in the face of vertex deletions. One of the most successful centrality measures is Google’s PageRank, introduced by Sergei Brin and Larry Page in 1998. Their importance measure uses a feedback loop that incorporates both local features and global structure to determine the most influential vertices.

To demonstrate the power of the network analysis, let’s turn to a fictional human continent: the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series stands among the most richly imagined fantasy sagas of our time. The books are populated by hundreds of characters enmeshed in a complex web of alliances, loyalties, histories and conflicts. Unusually, the series does not have a clear protagonist. Instead, the narrative perspective is shared across many prominent characters, emphasizing three competing royal houses: the forthright Starks, the unscrupulous Lannisters and the exiled Targaryens.

Here’s how we turned this complex story into an interaction network. After compiling an exhaustive list of characters and their nicknames, we generated a network for the first volume, A Game of Thrones, by linking two characters each time they appeared within fifteen words of one another. Each link corresponds to an interaction (either direct or indirect) between these characters. The resulting network is shown below (and you can find further analysis here). It contains 187 vertices and 684 weighted edges, accounting for 7,366 interactions. This system exhibits the hallmarks of large networks: a confederated small-world structure of strong and weak ties, loosely organized around a collection of hubs.

The network map of all the characters each link represented by coloured lines as described in the text.

Network science techniques draw out the hidden patterns in this complex relational data. Community detection discovers six main communities in A Game of Thrones. A suite of centrality measures highlights the different ways in which characters play essential roles. Prominence in this interaction network corresponds to narrative importance. PageRank’s feedback loop is particularly effective in this regard: encounters between prominent characters accelerate narrative development. PageRank rightly identifies Ned Stark as the clear protagonist of the first book.

Certainly, a reader doesn’t need mathematical analysis to draw similar conclusions about communities and characters. But that is actually quite remarkable! This streamlined model of interconnection encodes the salient features of Martin’s intricately plotted story. A subsequent mathematical analysis of the network decodes this information, revealing structure and rankings that align with the reader’s own conclusions. In short, we have succeeded in making a mathematical model that captures narrative development in A Game of Thrones.

Moreover, this quantitative vantage draws our eye to some subtler observations. This first volume clearly favors the Starks, but PageRank places Tyrion Lannister in second place, presaging the narrative expansion coming in the subsequent books. Meanwhile, the network penalises Jon and especially Daenerys for their remote separation from the main action. Their time is yet to come, with long, heroic journeys ahead before they become central to the game of thrones. On the other hand, it might be surprising that the cartoonish Robert nearly ties Catelyn for third place, but a second look confirms that most of that book’s action and intrigue revolves around him. In these cases, the network perspective inspires deeper reflection on these characters, and on the broader narrative itself.

Like Donne’s continent of humanity, complex systems arise from a fabric of objects. Our Westrosi example introduces the network analysis process: create a useful network model, analyse its structure, and then contextualise and interpret by reincorporating the original source. Network science provides a new toolkit for guiding and illuminating disciplinary investigation.

This approach is so broadly applicable precisely because network science emerged from the intersection of so many fields. That is remarkably appropriate for the study of interconnection.

References

  • A. L. Barabasi. Network Science. Cambridge University Press, 2016.
  • A.-L. Barabasi and R. Albert. The emergence of scaling in random networks. Science, 286:509-512, 1999.
  • S. Brin and L. Page. The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine. Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, 30:107-117, 1998.
  • D. Easley and J. Kleinberg. Networks, Crowds and Markets. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
  • S. Fortunato. Community detection in graphs. Physics Reports, 486(3-5):75-174, 2010.
  • M. Granovetter. The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78:1360-1380, 1973.
  • S. Milgram. The small-world problem. Psychology Today, 2:60-67, 1967.
  • M. Newman. Networks: An Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2010.
  • T. Schelling. Micromotives and Macrobehavior. Norton, 1978.
  • J. Travers and S. Milgram. An experimental study of the small world problem. Sociometry, 32(4):425-443, 1969.

Andrew Beveridge is an Associate Professor in the Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science Department at Macalester College in St Paul, Minnesota.

Paul Kurtz, Father of Secular Humanism, dies aged 86

Phil
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The following article is a press release from Prometheus Books, of which Kurtz was founder. Are more personal article was published by Kurtz’ former colleague , R Joseph Hoffman, on his blog. The photograph of Kurtz has also been reproduced from Hoffman’s blog.

Paul Kurtz, philosopher, prolific author, publisher, and founder of several secular humanist institutions as well as the for-profit independent press Prometheus Books, died on Saturday, October 20, 2012 at his home in Amherst, New York. He was 86.

Professor Kurtz was widely heralded as the “father of secular humanism.” With his fifty plus books (many translated into foreign languages around the world), multitudinous media appearances and public lectures, and other vast and seminal accomplishments in the organized skeptic and humanist movements, he was certainly the most important secular voice of the second part of the 20th century. He was an ardent advocate for the secular and scientific worldview and a caring, ethical humanism as a key to the good life.

Kurtz was a professor of philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo from 1965 to his retirement in 1991 as professor emeritus. He founded the publishing company Prometheus Books in 1969, Skeptical Inquirer magazine and the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) in 1976, Free Inquiry magazine and the Council for Secular Humanism in 1980, and the Center for Inquiry in 1991. Later projects included the launching of a scholarly journal, The Human Prospect, and a new nonprofit think tank, the Institute for Science and Human Values (both in 2010) where he served as chairman up until his death.

Paul Kurtz was born on December 21, 1925 in Newark, New Jersey. After graduating from high school he enrolled into Washington Square College at New York University, where he was elected freshman class president and became head of a student group called American Youth for Democracy. This was the beginning of his long romance with the power of ideas, but soon he would feel the call to serve his country.

Six months before his eighteenth birthday he enlisted in the army. In 1944 he and his unit found themselves smack in the middle of the Battle of the Bulge. Kurtz would later recall, “I was on the front lines for the rest of the war, in units liberating France, Belgium, Holland, and Czechoslovakia.” He entered both the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps shortly after they were liberated and met the survivors of Nazi brutality and their SS captors. It was an experience that would be seared in his memory for the rest of his life. Kurtz traveled with a copy of Plato’s Republic throughout the war, referring to it frequently during down times. His love of philosophy was becoming solidified during the most trying of times.

Upon the end of the war, Kurtz returned to the United States where he resumed his studies at New York University. It was there that he came face-to-face with the pragmatic naturalist Sidney Hook, the staunch anticommunist, humanist, and public philosopher who had studied himself under the leading American philosopher of the first part of the 20th century, John Dewey. Kurtz would later call this encounter “his most important intellectual experience.”

As “Dewey’s Bulldog,” Hook’s fierce commitment to democracy, humanism, secularism, and human rights exerted a powerful influence on the young student. Kurtz completed his undergraduate studies at NYU in 1948 and decided to continue his studies at Columbia University—where Dewey’s influence was even more palpable—but Hook and Kurtz would remain lifelong colleagues and friends. When Hook’s famous autobiography, Out of Step, was published in 1987, Hook sent a personal copy of the book to his former student with an inscription inside that read “Student, colleague, friend and co-worker in the vineyards in the struggle for a free society, who will carry the torch for the next generation.”

Kurtz went on to earn his MA and, in 1952, his PhD in philosophy at Columbia, where he studied under a group of distinguished professors—many of them former students of Dewey—and all scholars with sterling reputations of their own. The title of his dissertation was “The Problems of Value Theory.” His years at Columbia gave shape and definition to his life; he emerged from his rich educational experience as a philosopher firmly under the sway of pragmatic, naturalistic humanism. The upshot of this orientation was the abiding conviction that it was incumbent upon philosophers to descend from the isolation of the ivory tower and enter into the public arena where scientific and philosophical wisdom can be applied to the concrete moral and political problems of society at large and individual men and women engaged in the heat of life. This is the philosophical perspective that he would carry with him for the rest of his professional life.

Before settling at SUNY-Buffalo, Kurtz held academic positions at Trinity College in Connecticut (1952-59), Vassar College (1959-60), and Union College in Schenectady, New York 1960-65) during which time he also was a visiting lecturer at the New School for Social Research.

Kurtz was the editor of The Humanist magazine from 1967 to 1978 and was responsible for drafting Humanist Manifesto II, which was greeted with immediate enthusiasm upon its release in 1973. Endorsements rolled in from Sidney Hook, Isaac Asimov, Betty Friedan, Albert Ellis, B.F. Skinner, Maxine Greene, and James Farmer from the United States, and Nobel Prize–winner Francis Crick, Sir Julian Huxley, and A.J. Ayer from Great Britain. Altogether there were 275 signers. Humanist Manifesto II also became instant news, with a front-page story appearing in the New York Times, and articles in Le Monde in France and the London Times in Britain. An enduring phrase from that document stood as a clarion call to all clear thinking people that democratic, engaged, and responsible citizenship was needed like never before: “No deity will save us; we must save ourselves.”

The international skeptics movement got a lift in 1976 when Kurtz founded Skeptical Inquirer magazine. Concerned during the mid-1970s with the rampant growth of antiscience and pseudoscientific attitudes among the public at large, along with popular beliefs in astrology, faith healing, and claims of UFO and bigfoot sightings, Kurtz, along with fellow colleagues Martin Gardner and Joe Nickell, became a persistent foe of claptrap everywhere. As a critic of supernaturalism and the paranormal, he was consistently on the side of reason, always demanding evidence for extraordinary claims. It was during this period that Kurtz emerged in the public square as a stalwart proponent of the need for critical thinking in all areas of human life.

As a champion of many liberal causes during his lifetime, Kurtz became, during the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, an ardent supporter of women’s reproductive rights, voluntary euthanasia, the right to privacy, and the teaching of evolution in the public schools. And he was adamantly opposed to discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or skin color. Yet Kurtz often found himself the target of both the extreme left and the extreme right, as his own critical and moderating intelligence often led him to embrace centrist positions on a variety of issues. He was a strong critic of supernaturalism and religious fundamentalism, but decidedly against the tone of the militant atheists.

During the student riots of the Vietnam era, Kurtz and his colleague Hook organized a moderate liberal-conservative coalition of faculty from across the New York state university system to oppose the often violent disruptions occurring on campus, as rebellious students set fires, blocked entrances to classrooms, and staged sit-ins. Kurtz found himself thrust into the middle of the drama and the spotlight, as SUNY-Buffalo became known as the “Berkeley of the East.” Kurtz’s battle against the mayhem made him a target of the student and faculty radicals. Soon he was being bitterly castigated as a “right-wing fascist” and “lackey of Kissinger, Nixon, and Rockefeller.”

But it was Kurtz’s deep involvement with the international humanist movement where his indelible mark will be felt for many years to come. Of all his contributions, it was his role as the leading intellectual and organizational figure in humanist and free-thought circles that he relished the most. It was the animating force of his prolific career. Bill Cooke, an intellectual historian, wrote in 2011: “Like Hook, Paul Kurtz has always been keen to distance humanism from dogmatic allies of whatever stripe. And like Dewey, Kurtz has wanted to emphasize the positive elements of humanism; its program for living rather than its record of accusations against religion. But it was Kurtz’s fate to be prominent at a time of resurgent fundamentalism.”

“Free Inquiry (magazine) was founded in 1980 at a time when secular humanism was under heavy attack in the United States from the so-called Moral Majority,” wrote Kurtz in 2000. His aims were twofold: by reaching out to the leaders of thought and opinion and the educated layperson, he sought to bring intellectual cachet and respectability to the philosophy of secular humanism while also forthrightly defending the scientific and secular viewpoint at a time when it was being demonized. The magazine grew to become a highly respected journal of secular humanist thought and opinion.

Kurtz was responsible for drafting four highly influential documents (“manifestos”) that served as guideposts for the secular movement from 1973 to 2010. These statements attracted the endorsement and support of many of the world’s most esteemed scientists and authors, including E.O. Wilson, Steve Allen, Rebecca Goldstein, Steven Pinker, Arthur Caplan, Richard Dawkins, Brand Blanshard, Ann Druyan, Walter Kaufmann, Daniel Dennett, Terry O’ Neill, Paul Boyer, Lawrence Krauss, James Randi, Patricia Schroeder, Carol Tavris, Jean-Claude Pecker, and many more. His last and most recent excursus was the Neo-Humanist Statement of Secular of Principles and Values (2010) a forward-thinking blueprint for bringing humanism far into the 21st century and beyond, emphasizing the need for a planetary consciousness and a shared, secular ethic that can cut across ideological and cultural divisions.

A genuine pioneer, Kurtz was always blazing new trails. He was the first humanist leader to call for and help implement a concerted worldwide effort to attract people of African descent to organized humanism. He helped establish African Americans for Humanism (AAH) in 1989. He was instrumental in helping to create and support, with Jim Christopher, Secular Organizations for Sobriety (SOS), a nonreligious support group for those struggling with alcohol and drug addiction.

Especially proud of his cosmopolitanism, Kurtz’s impact was truly global in scope. In 2001, he helped finance the first major humanist conference in sub-Saharan Africa (Nigeria). He helped establish humanist groups in thirty African nations, Egypt, Romania, and the Netherlands. He was so highly admired in India that he became virtually a household name.

Settling into his role as the elder statesman of a movement he saw take on wings around the world, he wrote, “Embracing humanism intellectually and emotionally can liberate you from the regnant spiritual theologies, mythologies that bind you and put you out of cognitive touch with the real world. By embracing the power of humanism, I submit, you can lead an enriched life that is filled with joyful exuberance, intrinsically meaningful and developed within shared moral communities.”

Kurtz’s joyful philosophy of life is presented in The Fullness of Life (1974) and Exuberance: A Philosophy of Happiness (1977). Of his many published works, the two he was perhaps most proud of are The Transcendental Temptation (1986) and The Courage to Become (1997). His core books on the importance of critical intelligence and the ethics of humanism include The New Skepticism: Inquiry and Reliable Knowledge” (1992); Living without Religion: Eupraxsophy (1994); and Forbidden Fruit: The Ethics of Secularism (2008). His primer What Is Secular Humanism? (2006) is about as cogent and clear an introduction to the topic as one can find. Meaning and Value in a Secular Age—a collection of his seminal writings about eupraxsophy—was published this year.

Kurtz is survived by his wife, Claudine Kurtz; son, Jonathan Kurtz, and daughter-in-law Gretchen Kurtz; daughters Valerie Fehrenback and Patricia Kurtz; daughter Anne Kurtz and son-in-law Jesse Showers; and five grandchildren, Jonathan, Taylor, and Cameron Kurtz, and Jonathan and Jacqueline Fehrenback.

The family has requested that gifts or donations in honor of Prof. Kurtz be given to the Institute for Science and Human Values. A public celebration of his life will be held at a future date.

From the archive: Out with the old, in with the new? Blasphemy and religious law in the UK

Ryan Shaffer
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From the archive: Out with the old, in with the new? Blasphemy and religious law in the UK

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 22, Issue 3, from 2012.

After centuries of enforcement, the United Kingdom’s Blasphemy Law was abolished in March 2008 and was officially repealed in July 2008. Following hundreds of years of struggle, secularists sent the arcane law to history’s dustbin as a limitation of speech and safeguard of superstition. Despite the ongoing struggle between religion and government, opponents of the law thought it was a momentous achievement for free speech.

The celebration, however, may be short-lived. Great Britain, as well as France, Austria and other Western nations, has made it a crime to promote ‘religious hatred’ under various anti-discrimination and hate-crime laws (Turley, 2009). In fact, the same month the Blasphemy Law was abolished a 15-year-old boy was arrested for holding a sign that said, “Scientology is not a religion, it is a dangerous cult” in front of Scientology’s London headquarters.

While the Crown Prosecution Service eventually ruled the boy’s sign was not “abusive or insulting” to the church, in early 2009 the British police warned the public that it would consider making insults towards Scientology a crime.

More recently, Rowan Laxton, a high-ranking diplomat at the British Foreign Office, was arrested on suspicion of inciting religious hatred under the 2006 Act for yelling “[f]ucking Israelis, fucking Jews” while watching news reports about an Israeli attack on Gaza as he rode an exercise bike in a gym (Andrews & Cohen, 2009). In May, Laxton, who worked in the Middle East and South Asia, was officially charged with “racially aggravated harassment” and, if convicted, he faced a maximum of seven years in prison, a fine, or both (Daily Telegraph, 2009). In September 2009, he was convicted and was fined £350 and forced to pay £500 in prosecution costs.

A strong case could be made that prosecuting people for denouncing a religion is simply replacing one form of the Blasphemy Law with a new version. That becomes clearer when one compares religion to other beliefs, such as politics where one is not silenced for denouncing Marxism, capitalism, democracy, or fascism. To understand these issues we must look at the historical cases of blasphemy cases.

A short history of blasphemy

Prior to the 17th century, criticizing the Church of England was punishable by torture, prison, death, or a combination of the above. This was true of James Naylor, a Quaker, convicted of blasphemy in 1656. Historians Robert Bucholz and Newton Key explained that Naylor was

pilloried in London, whipped through the streets of Bristol, his tongue pierced with a hot iron, his forehead branded with a ‘B’ (for blasphemer), and, [was] finally put to death.

BUCHOLZ & KEY, 2003, page 254

Towards the end of the century the law was modified with the Blasphemy Act of 1697 preventing anyone from holding an official position in the Church or government who, for example, claimed there was more than one god.

In the following year, the Blasphemy Act of 1698 (for England and Wales) set a harsher penalty that defined blasphemy in several ways, including the denial of the Holy Scriptures to be divine authority. This changed the law so the harshest penalty one could receive was three years imprisonment after the third offence.

In the next century, the law was enforced for political reasons, targeting Thomas Williams (1797) and Richard Carlile (1819) who were indicted for blasphemy when they sold Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason. The state argued Paine’s book attacked the Old Testament. Yet, there is still controversy and debate surrounding which specific religion and what the words were really targeting.

By 1838 the court ruled one cannot be prosecuted for blasphemy if the religion criticized was Judaism, Islam, or Christian sects outside the Anglican Church. The law was restricted to protect the “tenets and beliefs of the Church of England” from criticism. In an 1838 case, Judge Edward Hall Alderson told the jury:

A person may, without being liable to prosecution for it, attack Judaism, or Mahomedanism, or even any sect of the Christian religion (save the established religion of the country); and the only reason why that latter is in a different situation from the others is, because it is the form established by law, and is therefore a part of the constitution of the country.

THE TIMES, 1990

In the 20th century, there have been only two convictions under the law: In 1922, John William Gott was sentenced to nine months of hard labour for saying Jesus Christ entered Jerusalem “like a circus clown on the back of two donkeys”. More recently in 1976, Mary Whitehouse brought a private prosecution of Gay News Ltd. and editor Denis Lemon over Professor James Kirkup’s poem “The Love that Dares to Speak its Name” published in the Gay News. The poem, in part, read:

As they took him from the cross

I, the centurion, took him in my arms –

the tough lean body

of a man no longer young,

beardless, breathless,

but well hung.

Lemon was convicted and the judge nearly sent him to jail, but decided on a suspended sentence. Nonetheless, Lemon was fined £500 and Gay News was fined £1,000, which did not include the £10,000 in court costs. Whitehouse celebrated the conviction saying,

I’m rejoicing because I saw the possibility of Our Lord being vilified. Now it’s been shown that it won’t be.

Lemon appealed, but the Court of Appeal upheld the conviction in 1978. This led some politicians to debate whether to repeal the law, but the law’s critics never gained significant support.

Ten years later, in 1988, Whitehouse denounced Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ asking the British Board of Film Classification director to “bear in mind that if the film were as offensive as it sounded, it would give offense to many people and could result in some kind of action for blasphemy.” She also wrote to the office of Britain’s attorney general who then considered indicting the distributors of Scorsese’s film if they screened the movie. Though the threat was never acted on, it demonstrates how the law served as a tool for fundamentalists to threaten censorship of ideas. The result of such a threat might cause a chilling effect of getting would-be critics to remain silent out of fear of prosecution.

Despite the law being limited to the Church of England, some British Muslims called for Salman Rushdie to be punished for The Satanic Verses. Among the parts that Muslims consider blasphemous were writings of a fictionalized account of Muhammad, naming him Mahound (an old Christian term calling the prophet Satanic), and giving prostitutes in a brothel the same names of Muhammad’s wives.

In 1989, Paul O’Higgins, Professor of Law at King’s College, wrote that the Rushdie controversy demonstrated that the UK’s Blasphemy Law was a relic of an older era having no place in modern society. Whereas, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said,

[f]reedom of speech and expression is subject only to the laws of this land, particularly libel and blasphemy, and will remain subject to the rule of law. It is absolutely fundamental in all we believe and cannot be interfered with by any outside force.

Though the Prime Minister was opposed to enforcing the law on Rushdie for his criticizing of Islam, the law remained.

Abolishing the law

Critics of the Blasphemy Law were reenergized when Parliament passed the Human Rights Act of 1998. The act made it illegal for any public body or law to be in contradiction to the European Convention on Human Rights. The law was in contradiction of articles nine and ten of the Convention in which article nine promised,

[f]reedom to change his religion or belief and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance,

whereas article ten gave the

[f]reedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.

Despite the obvious contradiction, the issue was never pressed.

In December 2007, the High Court rejected an attempt by a Christian evangelical group to prosecute the BBC for showing Jerry Springer: The Opera. In the following month, the Commons and the Lords considered abolishing the law, a movement which gained momentum with former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey writing that the law was discriminatory since it protected only beliefs of the Church of England.

Subsequently, Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s office announced they would consider abolishing the law. Yet, the spokesman said:

However, we do believe it is necessary to consult with the churches, particularly the Anglican Church, before coming to a final decision, and that’s what we are doing.

After being consulted, the Church agreed with repealing it. In March, the Justice and Immigration Bill was passed, thus repealing the law, which officially began in July.

Old wine, new bottles?

The purpose of the Blasphemy Law was to protect a superstitious belief: it seems that preventing people from insulting a belief with the 2006 Racial and Religious Hatred Act does the same. In 1949, Lord Denning reflected on the Blasphemy Law explaining:

“he reason for this law was because it was thought that a denial of Christianity was liable to shake the fabric of society, which was itself founded upon Christian religion. There is no such danger to society now and the offence of blasphemy is a dead letter.

But after hundreds of years, it appears that religion is still given a level of protection that democracy itself does not receive. One can spew hatred and disgust at democracy and free speech, but if someone directs that hate to religion they might be prosecuted. Why is religion treated differently than the government and political system that gives us the right to practice our own religion?

References

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