Magic Statistics

Here's the latest on the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill that was the focus of my previous post:

The government has been heavily defeated in the Lords over plans to outlaw incitement to religious hatred.

Peers voted by a majority of 149 in favour of a cross-bench move to put freedom of speech safeguards into the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill. Opponents say proposed legislation is drawn too widely and could outlaw criticisms of beliefs.
. . .
Ministers reject claims that the current bill would stop free speech. But comedian Rowan Atkinson has called it "draconian". Last week a group of opponents, including him and former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey, suggested a series of amendments.

These include making sure nobody is found guilty of religious hate crimes unless it is proved they intended to stir up hatred. Only "threatening words" should be banned by the bill, not those which are only abusive or insulting, they added.

Could it be that the Brits are not yet willing to be fully Canadianized?

Click on this link for a photo of a bearded Rowan Atkinson looking pensive.

via Fjordman.

Speaking of political correctness, as I did in my previous post, here's an interesting theory on why laws encourage political correctness, even if the laws are never actually invoked to prosecute anyone.

In the main, they [laws] don’t proceed by telling you what to do and prosecuting you when you don’t do it. They get you to do the work. You decide that even running the smallest chance of legal proceedings isn’t worth the risk. You may as well just fall in line.

In every swimming pool, public library, school and hospital in the land staff are imposing regulations that go beyond the intent of the original framers of the law. Just in case. You can never be too careful, you see. Don’t want any legal problems, do we?

What do women have to do with it? We husbands know that we censor our words and actions because we don't want to get in trouble with the wife. "I'd better not do that because she might get her knickers in a twist". Husbands who want to stay happily and peacefully married impose a priori restrictions on their own behaviour in the belief that it's best to avoid trouble before it arises rather than deal with the furor afterwards. Thus,

Laws work like women. That is what is wrong with the Government’s Racial and Religious Hatred Bill. Laws work like women.
. . .
The Racial and Religious Hatred Bill may not produce many court cases. Even on the rare occasions when the police and crown prosecution services decide to act, the Attorney General may intervene to avoid a political controversy. But this doesn’t mean that the legislation will have no impact on free speech.

Of course it will. It will have an impact every time the the local arts centre decides that perhaps it had better not book a certain act, or a cinema chain decides not to show a certain film, or a school decides not to hire out its hall to certain speakers. It will have an impact every time the wording of a council leaflet is changed or the local church changes its mind about the topic of its study evening.

In myriad ways, little by little, our freedom will be eroded. And most of the time we won’t even notice. Pretty soon we’ll come to think that it was our idea, that we like it this way. Laws, you see, work like women.

Political correctness runs amok in the UK, and a sociologist at an English university says Britain is succumbing to Canadianization:

Last week, city council in the northern city of Hull sent staffers an e-mail telling them to stop using such words as "lady," "ethnic," "senior citizen," "love," "spastic" or "dyke" that might cause offence.

In Manchester, a hit-and-run victim was scolded by police for describing the driver as "fat". And the BBC spent much of the summer dithering over whether terrorist could be used to describe the 7/7 bombers.

"What has gone wrong is the Canadianization of Britain," says Professor Christie Davies, a sociologist at the University of Reading and author of The Mirth of Nations, an academic study of humour and censorship.

He means that Canadians, especially Torontonians, led the charge for political correctness at the expense of free speech, and now Britain is following suit. "I regarded Toronto almost as being in the old East Germany," he said.

On the other hand, I don't know of any jurisdictions in Canada that have banned images of pigs or the national flag. But no doubt one shouldn't speak too soon. It could happen here.

via Relapsed Catholic.

The alacrity with which atheists in the blogosphere and beyond latched on to Gregory Paul's study purporting to show a correlation between religious belief and social pathologies has baffled me. As I and others have shown, Mr Paul's "study" was astonishingly simple-minded, statistically incompetent, and utterly lacking any foundation in social scientific theory. Moreover, the fact that it contradicted hundreds of other, statistically credible and scientifically rigorous studies would, one would have thought, give pause to those who agreed with its alleged "findings".

Despite all these rather obvious defects, atheists held it aloft as if it were the Holy Grail. I wondered: "Whatever happened to atheism's much-vaunted critical reason?"

As one who made a contribution to debunking Mr Paul's silly little investigation, I witnessed ad hominem attacks of the most puerile sort: "You're a Christian, so I can’t believe a word you say". It's rather sad–pathetic, really.

A possible explanation appears in this morning's Guardian: Atheists simply aren't as smart as they like to think they are.

Guess who said this: "How much boundlessly stupid naivety is there in the scholar's belief in his superiority, in the good conscience of his tolerance, in the simple, unsuspecting certainty with which his instincts treat the religious man as inferior and a lower type which he has himself evolved above and beyond." Some uppity Christian complaining about warmed-up anti-clericalism in the Guardian? Or the most vociferous atheist of them all, that great genius of anti-Christianity, Friedrich Nietzsche. For although Nietzsche hated Christianity, he also recognised that atheism is prone to a self-satisfied smugness in which religion is written off as a fool's game, practiced by suckers and easily coopted by the wicked.
. . .
The joke is that many who were converted [to atheism] at university via Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene think of themselves as agents of some subversive counterculturalism. This is ridiculous to Da Vinci Code proportions. Contemporary atheism is mainstream stuff. As John Updike put it: "Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position."

Sounds about right to me.

via titusonenine.