Towards True Marriage Equality

Like most progressive people, I'm in favour of a legal redefinition of marriage to make it fairer and more equal for as many people as possible. If for no other reason than the various legal perks and advantages that are given to married people in many countries, I think this is an issue that needs to be taken seriously.

What I want to talk about here is what a fair definition of marriage should be, and ask whether we as a society are actually ready to accept the repercussions of that definition. I see a lot of pro-gay-marriage people happily insult non-progressives as bigoted and homophobic, which is often quite justified, but I also see these same people displaying the bigoted behavior they condemn to other underrepresented minorities, without even appearing to realize that they're being the exact same kind of bigot that they rail against. Let me explain, and you can then decide if I'm full of crap or not!

Definition

The traditional definition of marriage is generally something of the form:

The legally or formally recognized union of a man and a woman as partners in a relationship.

The progressive definition I would argue for is something like this:

The legally or formally recognized union of consenting adults as partners in a relationship.

Think about this and decide if you agree that this is a reasonable definition. In arguments about marriage equality, progressives will typically focus on limiting marriage to being between a man and a woman as being unreasonably restrictive, and argue that any consenting adults should be able to form a legal union if they wish. I agree with this general principle, but it's important that we look at the cases that it does and doesn't cover, and see if we agree that we're on the right track.

What Marriage Wouldn't Cover

Opponents of gay marriage often bring up various cases and argue that redefining marriage will result in some kind of ridiculous slippery slope to absurdity, so let's look at those cases and see how they are handled by our progressive definition:

Marrying children.

Requiring marriage to be between consenting adults is important in order to exclude claims that someone would be able to marry a child. A child isn't sufficiently mentally developed to enter into a union of this kind, so this seems to be a reasonable restriction. And obviously marrying children isn't possible with our progressive definition, so this argument is invalid.

Marrying animals.

Another popular claim is that redefining marriage will result in bestiality and people wanting to marry their pets or other animals. Now, we can be explicit and say consenting adult humans if we really want to be pedantic, since that is our intention here, but the fact that animals do not have the ability to consent to marriage should already cover this.

Marrying inanimate objects.

Following on from the previous one, no one would be able to marry their car or their favourite sex doll or any other object, since like with animals, inanimate objects cannot consent to anything. 

What Marriage Would Cover

This is where things will get interesting for progressives. Remember again that if you want to argue that marriage should be between consenting adults in order to argue in favour of gay marriage, you need to accept the implications of this redefinition, or be guilty of hypocrisy.

Incestuous marriages.

If two consenting adults want to marry and they happen to be related to each other, what reasonable objection can we give to this? Whether it's two brothers, a brother and sister, a father and daughter, two cousins, or any other combination, they're consenting adults, and what justification do we have for stopping them?

Some people will just jump straight to the "incest is gross" line of reasoning and not even go any further than that. And this is understandable, since there is a strong inbuilt aversion in most humans to avoid sexual attraction to relatives, for good evolutionary reasons. But we're not talking about forcing anyone to do anything. The question is, if for whatever reason two related people are sexually attracted to each other and want to get married, do we have a reasonable objection to it?

We really need to keep in mind the principle that "just because I don't like something isn't good enough reason to stop others from doing that thing". This is one of the exact arguments that homophobic people use against gay marriage. Because they think homosexuality is disgusting, that should be enforced on everyone.

One argument that usually comes up with incestuous marriage is the one about higher risk of deformed children. This is undoubtedly a reality, but consider why this isn't an effective argument:

• Related couples can have children without being married. Marriage isn't some kind of license that people require before they can procreate, so limiting it in this case makes no sense.
• Marriage does not necessarily involve children. This is an argument that is often leveled against gay marriage, and the same answer applies. A couple can marry without having children, or they can adopt children if they want. It's important that an incestuous couple is aware of the risks, but that's not a reason to forbid marriage.

Polygamy and polyandry.

Do we have a good reason for limiting marriage to being specifically between two people? This is certainly what most people want, but just like gay or incestuous marriage, if multiple consenting adults want to have this kind of union, is there any good reason not to allow it?

I think the biggest legitimate concern would be if people abused this kind of marriage as a legal loophole, say by some cult having all members marry to take advantage of spousal property ownership transfer laws, or the board of directors of a corporation all marrying to take advantage of laws that protect a person from having speak against their spouse in a criminal case (where these laws exist).

But assuming we can deal with those legal issues, is there any reasonable moral objection that we can give? I can't see a good reason to limit marriage in this way, just like I can't see good reason to limit it to being between a man and a woman.

We should also be aware that there are two different cases here: A group of more than two people all being married to each other; and a person being married multiple times simultaneously, but those partners not being married to each other. I think both are legitimate cases.

Again, we need to remember the point that just because we don't like something or want to do something, that's not a good enough reason to deny it to others who do want that thing. There might be other reasons that could apply, but this isn't one in itself.

Equality

It's easy to think that laws should be based around what the majority wants, and ignore minorities. To some degree this is fair, since it's unlikely that you can make laws that will satisfy every member of society, so when you have to choose, going with what the majority wants is often the best trade off. Hell, that's what elections are!

But we do need to reconsider laws when we find that some minority is being unfairly treated and we don't have a sufficient justification for it. This has been the case for LGBT rights. Minorities generally can't get enough political will behind their agendas without some of the majority getting on board, and so as more people have decided that we can accommodate LGBT people in various ways without unreasonably affecting the majority, the momentum has gathered enough to bring about change.

As that change happens, we need to stay aware of other minorities that we can help in the process, and not treat them the exact same way the majority has treated the minority group we are focused on. It's far too easy for most people to dismiss people who are in incestuous or polygamous relationships as 'weirdos' or 'freaks' or 'abominations in the eyes of god' or other uncharitable things, but it's important to remember that they are consenting adults who aren't hurting anyone, and these are the exact labels that LGBT people have been fighting for years. We shouldn't just push the intolerance down onto the next minority group and consider it a victory.

If we really do care about marriage equality, and really do think that consenting adults should be free to marry, then we need to also accept all of the people that this redefinition affects, or we're just as bigoted as the homophobes and other non-progressives.

In (Partial) Defense of the Death Penalty

With the recent sentence of the death penalty being given to Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, it seems like an appropriate time to discuss some of the issues surrounding the death penalty.

To get started, let me state where I stand on the issue. I generally support the death penalty in theory, but oppose it in practice. My opposition mainly is due to two issues:

• Trusting the legal system to not sentence innocent people to death
• Humane methods of imposing the death penalty

To be clear, I don't support the death penalty as a method of retributive justice. I am generally against forms of justice that involve making people suffer. This is a big reason why I support the death penalty in the first place. I think it is far crueler to lock a person up for life with no hope of freedom in an environment that forces them to develop the worst aspects of themselves in order to survive, than to humanely put them down.

I understand that when people do bad things, there is often a very strong desire by the victims, families of the victims, and often the public in general to see that person suffer as part of justice, but I don't think this is an impulse we should embrace, but rather this is the ugly part of us that makes us more like the person we are trying to punish, and the one we should work to move away from.

I see our system of imprisoning and punishing people to serve three useful purposes:

• Stopping dangerous people from having the opportunity to offend again
• Providing a deterrent to those who might be considering committing a crime
• Rehabilitating the offender if possible

Making the offender suffer should not be on that list, no matter how good it might make other people feel. I'm sure you've heard when some rapist or child molester is sent to prison, people say things like, "Good, now I hope he gets raped in prison". Maybe you've even said and thought this yourself. Stop and think about what a horrible thing this is to wish on any human being. And also stop and think about how often innocent people get sent to prison. So you're ultimately hoping for a system that subjects innocent people to that kind of suffering on top of falsely imprisoning them. Everyone should wish for a safe prison environment where offenders can serve their time without fear of being raped or killed, if for no other reason than for the sake of all the innocent people who end up in there. You can't pick and choose, hoping that only the actually guilty people are made to suffer.

Objections

So let's talk about some of the common objections to the death penalty, and why I don't think they're sufficient.

Putting someone to death is cruel.

Certainly, it can be cruel if done in a cruel way. I don't at all advocate for barbaric execution methods like the electric chair. But given the existence of drugs used for peaceful euthanasia in countries like the Netherlands, if you can't put someone to death humanely by lethal injection then you're simply doing it wrong.

Putting someone to death is not cruel enough.

The flipside of the previous objection, this is where people feel like the death penalty lets an offender off easy, essentially by not forcing them to stew for years and think about what they've done. There are a few issues here.

One, if the offender is a psychopath, they will probably never end up feeling remorse for what they did, no matter how long they're imprisoned. At best, they'll feel bad that they got caught.

Two, this argument really doesn't make sense to me coming from any religious person who believes in an afterlife. Surely, you feel that he's going to get adequately punished by your god after he dies, right?

Three, as I've stated above, I don't think the desire to make an offender suffer is one we should be promoting. If an offender is unlikely to be able to be rehabilitated into a trustworthy member of society, then putting them down is, in my opinion, the most humane thing you can do. And everyone else will have to accept that making the offender suffer is not going to undo the damage, and they're going to have to find more constructive ways to work through their grief and loss. Enjoying the suffering of others is never a path to long term psychological wellbeing.

Putting someone to death makes us just as bad as them.

Obviously, putting someone to death as punishment is not at all the same thing as, say, a murderer killing a bunch of innocent people. Equating these things makes as much sense as equating killing in self defense and murder. Just because a death is involved does not make them morally the same thing.

Consider a different example: have you ever heard anyone say that we shouldn't put kidnappers in prison because that would make us just as bad as them? We imprison a kidnapper against his will even though that's what he did to someone else, because it's not at all the same thing. Similarities between the crime and the punishment are just that, similarities, and they don't necessarily equate the two things morally.

Death is what he wants, and so we shouldn't give it to him.

This is one of the arguments that has come up in the Dzhokhar Tsarnaev case. The idea that he wants to be a martyr, that he wants to go to heaven and get his 72 virgins or whatever, so we shouldn't give it to him.

Firstly, if you're not a Muslim yourself, this argument makes no sense, since you, by definition, do not believe he has the reward waiting for him that he thinks he has, so what better punishment than giving him the rude awakening? The longer he lives, the longer he gets to enjoy the thought of all the rewards that he thinks are waiting for him.

But probably more importantly, who cares what he wants? Again, the object isn't retribution and suffering. You keep him from harming others, you send a deterrence message to other would-be criminals, and if you can't reasonably expect to ever rehabilitate and release him, you humanely put him down. But fucking with him based on what he wants shouldn't be part of the program, because we should strive to be better than that.

My Objections

So, as I mentioned at the beginning, I have my own objections to the death penalty in practice. There have been far too many innocent people put on death row in the US to be able to support the death penalty with the justice system as it currently is there (and I'm sure the same is true in other countries), except in the rare cases where the guilt of the person is really not up for debate. This is the case with someone like Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, where no one, as far as I'm aware, has ever argued that he is innocent. If this was the kind of certainty bar that was used in all death penalty cases then I would be willing to reconsider that stance.

And the other one is the apparent difficulty in humanely putting criminals to death. I don't know if this is due to incompetence, or a secret desire to actually make these people suffer, but it seems ridiculous that this should be an issue. And yet it is, and so I wouldn't support the death penalty unless that was sorted out.

My Reasons for Support

So why do I support the death penalty in theory? Well, in general I think our criminal justice system should be more focused on rehabilitation, and I think society would be a far better place if that was taken more seriously. In practice, it seems that going to prison tends to do the opposite of rehabilitate, and when combined with limiting a person's options for getting law abiding employment after they are released, tends to send people down a negative life spiral rather than give them a genuine chance to make amends and start again, even if they really do feel remorse and want to do that.

But for some people, even with a perfect system of rehabilitation, this will simply never work for them. Whether due to mental illness like psychopathy; a mental state that is so damaged by bad life experience that it really can't be repaired; the need for a strong enough deterrent for some crimes so it is understood that if you commit them you will never be set free; or due to crimes so heinous that the general public would simply never feel safe if they were set free; humanely putting that person down is not an act of vengeance or cruelty, but the opposite: a pragmatic choice and an act of decency when a perfect solution doesn't exist.

Is Western Culture Oversensitive to Hitler?

Hitler Chic In Thailand - Photo credit: Tibor Krausz / CNNGO

"Hang on", I hear you saying. "Are you about to defend Hitler?"

No, rest assured that this is not a post defending Hitler or the Nazis, or any kind of anti-Semitic statement. What I do want to discuss though, is how much we should expect other cultures to share our own sensitivities, how much we can be unaware of our own insensitivities to other cultures, and how we can deal with cultural offense in an increasingly globally connected world.

So, a recent episode of the excellent Last Week Tonight with John Oliver had a segment on the growing trend in Thailand of 'Hitler Chic', the use of Hitler and Nazi imagery for humour:

For once, this is something that I kind of disagree with John Oliver about, so I thought it would be worth discussing.

Caricature

So, the obvious issue is that many people in western culture feel that using Hitler imagery for humour or fun trivializes the horrible things that he was responsible for. There is likely some truth to this, but we also need to recognize the massive degree to which Hitler and the Nazis have become the go-to example of evil in our culture. So many discussions involving politics, slippery slopes, and in fact just about anything, end up with someone playing the Hitler or Nazi card at some point. Now, this can be totally fair, as often a discussion can be clarified by taking it to an extreme to show where a line of reasoning may lead, but with Hitler this has become so overdone, so much the only reference most people seem to share, that we have even coined a term for it, Godwin's Law:

"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1"

Basically, western culture seems to have so few common references to draw on where people can be confident that others will get what they mean, that we've practically turned Hitler into a caricature of evil, and we're on the verge (if not already crossed over) of no longer being able to reasonably include a reference to him in a serious discussion.

No Paucity of Examples

Now of course, a persuasive leader who started a world war and committed arguably the largest act of genocide in human history is not someone to take lightly, but it's not as if we're lacking in other examples. What is problematic with western culture is how little most people (and I include myself here) are aware of other examples, when there is no shortage.

One of the examples of genocide I tend to use is the horrific genocide in Rwanda of the Tutsis by the Hutus. Here is a genocide of up to 1 million people that took place only 20 years ago, yet most westerners probably know next to nothing about it. It's a fantastic example of how normal people can literally turn against their neighbours and kill them, and it even includes the church and religion playing a big part in provoking it.

Or take Holodomor, the "hunger extermination" of Ukranians in 1932-3 that killed between 2.5 and 7.5 million people, on the same scale as the Holocaust.

If you want horrible dictators, how about Pol Pot, responsible for millions of deaths in Cambodia, as just one of many, many examples.

Or what about Hirohito or Tojo and all of the horrible deaths they were responsible for before and during World War 2? There is no Godwin's Law for them.

Perspective

If our view of Hitler and Nazis was kept in perspective, we would use them as examples and be sensitive to them in roughly relative proportion to other events and people in recent history. But we don't do that, and that should be a sign to us that maybe we're oversensitive to one thing and far too ignorant on many, many others.

And so, we find other cultures that, for whatever reason, don't hold the same level of sensitivity about something as we do, and we insist that they should change? Like it or not, Hitler and the Nazis generated some very striking imagery, and so it shouldn't be surprising that it would get appropriated in places that aren't as sensitive to it, such as Thailand. Why not?

We do it ourselves all the time too. How familiar and iconic is this Che Guevara image?

Photo credit: Alberto Korda - Museo Che Guevara, Havana Cuba

It has appeared on t-shirts, in art, and in so many locations with most people not even knowing or caring if anyone would be offended by its use. It's striking and not offensive to the people using it, so they use it.

Or, since we're talking about Thailand, consider the use of Yantra tattoos, which many westerners get because they look cool, despite that it's often offensive to Thai people for religious reasons.

Sak Yant Tattoo performed in Thailand - Photo credit: Ryaninuk

The Past, the Future

Different cultures are sensitive to different things and to different degrees, that's normal. Generally, over time, that sensitivity diminishes and what was once offensive or taboo becomes a piece of pop culture. In Thailand, a Hitler Teletubby shirt is funny, but for most westerners, it's not. But we should remember, that in the west we can open a Viking themed restaurant, for example, with no one being offended in the least, but this wasn't always the case either.

We live in an increasingly globally connected world where there is much common ground, but we're going to keep coming across differences between cultures. Some of those will be considered interesting and welcomed by other cultures. Some of them will be a sensitivity that won't be shared. I would never argue that being sensitive to another culture is likely to be a bad thing, but ironically, that also means being sensitive to the fact that they might not feel the same way about something that you're sensitive to, and not requiring them to share your point of view.

We can only shield ourselves from these cultural differences to a limited degree, and that is going to keep reducing over time. So we need to accept that either we push everyone in the world towards a lowest common denominator where no one does or says anything that could offend any other culture, or we accept that these differences are going to exist and that it's okay. The past tells us that historical things that we're sensitive to now, we won't be at some point in the future, it's just a question of how soon. So we shouldn't hold it against other cultures because they got there sooner than we did.

Homosexual Acceptance and Cultural Change

As time has gone by we have had numerous cultural shifts in society where a group has gained acceptance and better treatment. When this happens, quite often large cultural changes result as previous behaviors and traditions become no longer morally or logically justifiable. The acceptance of black people as being equal to whites; women being equal to men; disabled people being worthy of the same respect as the able bodied; violence not being an acceptable way to discipline children; animals being more than just objects for us to use for our own ends.

When these shifts occur there are often large changes as society adapts. White people had to learn to co-exist with black people rather than segregating them. Men had to learn to co-exist in workplaces with women. People speaking up when they see someone beating their child (or wife!). Animal fighting sports become less socially acceptable.

A recent change that has the potential to cause large social changes, and that will almost certainly require a lot of people to be dragged into accepting that change, is the acceptance of homosexuals as first class citizens. For the most part, if homosexuals weren't outright persecuted, then typically the attitude of society was more like, "as long as you keep to yourselves and don't make us have to change to accommodate you, then we're cool". But as fights for homosexual rights and equality are being won, this kind of attitude is becoming less acceptable and society at large has to start addressing the behaviors and traditions we have that are not inclusive of homosexuals.

There is a rather unique area of cultural change required here, and that is the various social customs of segregating males and females. What makes this so unique is that homosexuals basically throw a spanner in the works of any social segregation that is justified by the argument that people who are sexually attracted to each other need to be kept apart under some circumstances.

Public restrooms; change rooms in gyms; schools; military and other high stress environments where sexual interest is considered a distraction or danger; prisons even. People will argue that this segregation is about things like modesty, respect, etc, but this is just a red herring. Except for some rare exceptions such as sports where the strength differences between men and women make for an unfair playing field, all of these places in society where we segregate males and females come down to perceived problems of having people who are sexually attracted to each other having to interact in ways that they may feel uncomfortable doing.

This is not controversial. Most men will fart or go to the toilet with other men around, but not feel comfortable doing the same around women. Most women will change at their local gym with other women present, but would never do so with men around. And so on.

But this is where homosexuals force society to rethink these conventions, because the same social structures simply don't work for them. When two groups are attracted to each other, you can keep them separate. But when members within a group are attracted to each other, this is no longer an option. The largest heterosexual group you can create without sexual attraction being a potential issue is effectively infinite: all heterosexual men or all heterosexual women. The largest homosexual group you can create without sexual attraction being a potential issue is two: one homosexual man and one homosexual woman. Add any other homosexual or heterosexual person and you have a potential sexual attraction issue.

Here's the thing though: we expect homosexuals to deal with it. We expect the homosexual man to deal with taking a shit in the men's restroom, and get over the potential embarrassment. We expect the homosexual woman to get changed at the gym surrounded by other women. We expect the homosexual teenager at the all boys or all girls school to deal with the distraction that these schools exist to remove. They simply don't have a choice. It's either isolate yourself or learn to deal with it.

So this is the cultural shift that we need to start dealing with. If homosexuals can handle being in close proximity with those they are sexually attracted to, maybe the rest of us can too. Maybe we should hold everyone to these same high standards. Or are we going to just say that homosexuals are more mature people and heterosexuals are immature and can't be trusted to behave? It would indeed be a strange kind of discrimination for society to say that homosexuals aren't equal: they're better people!

If you've read this far and these ideas make you feel uncomfortable, then congratulations! This is what cultural shift feels like. All of those people who came before you spending their lives with a social convention that was then changed underneath them felt the same way. This is why it's often said that for real social change to happen the old people need to die out to make way for the new ideas. And when you're living through social change, you get to choose if you're going to be part of that change, or if you're going to be one of the people that society waits to die so that progress can happen.

How Do We Decide What's Right?

So, here's a hypothetical I want you to really think about. You hear on the news one day that a new law has been passed: if the biological mother of a child up to 12 months old decides that she no longer wants the child, she can take the toddler to a clinic and have it put down.

The justifications behind the law aren't important. All that matters is you probably disagree with this law. You probably think it's morally abhorrent. You probably think that it's murder.

What would you do? If you suddenly found yourself living in a country that legalized the murder of toddlers under a year old, what would you do? Would you write a stern letter to your local paper? Would you start an activist group to have the law changed. Would you start picketing out the front of Toddler Termination Clinics? Would you wish that someone burned down those clinics? Would you consider doing it yourself?

We often have to hold our tongues and accept living in a society where the laws don't quite match our personal morals. It's rare, probably non-existent, for a person to agree 100% with every law they are held to. Maybe it's speed limits. Maybe it's some tax law. Maybe it's which drugs are legal and which are not, and the penalties involved.

For the most part we accept this. But what happens when there is a law we really object to, that we cannot in clear conscience support? Legal slavery. Discrimination against women. The death penalty. We generally feel that it is our moral duty to speak up. We may even feel it is our moral duty to disobey that law, to take a stand. And we often respect others who do this.

At least, when we agree with them.

And that's kind of the point of my hypothetical at the top. Most people would feel outraged if such a law was passed in their country, and would probably become actively involved in trying to change it. It would not be uncommon for people to verbally attack those who made use of the law. Some might even commit acts of violence. And many people would, if not outright support such things, at least be sympathetic to those who did.

So when it comes to issues like abortion, most would probably claim to understand this point, but I actually don't think they do: for a person who genuinely believes that life begins at conception, they really do believe that abortion is murder, and you're asking them to accept and live in a society that legalizes the murder of a helpless 'child' under some circumstances. It doesn't matter whether their belief is true here. To them it is. It's just as true to them as the belief that terminating a six month old toddler is murder to you.

And this raises the really crucial question: how do you determine the laws of your country for issues that some group will find morally abhorrent, no matter which side the law favours? How do you decide which people get a law that matches their moral intuitions, and which people have to just suck it up and live with laws they strongly morally oppose?

One option is simple strength in numbers, and this actually is kind of what does tend to happen in practice. Slavery is legal until enough people object to it. The death penalty is legal until enough voices speak out against it. Euthanasia stays illegal in most places because too many religious people believe that suicide under all circumstances is an unforgiveable sin, and not enough other people have witnessed a terminally ill loved one suffering to be outraged.

But most people would not say that slavery should be legal as long as the majority are okay with it. We tend to think that there is a certain objectivity to morals, and that as societies develop and flourish the people within those societies gain empathy. Something that is also undoubtedly true but probably acknowledged by less people is that as science and understanding of the universe increases and the power of religions decreases, we learn things that make the justifications behind some laws no longer hold.

Once you can show that black people are not mentally inferior to white people, you can no longer justify slavery on that basis (at least, not if you're honest and rational). You can't withold the vote from women because they're inferior to men if science shows that this isn't true. And you can't claim that life begins at conception if the evidence shows that a fertilized egg doesn't become a viable organism until much later.

But you can certainly claim that a soul is injected into that fertilized egg at the moment of conception.

Of course you can claim that. How could anyone prove otherwise? Just like you can claim that homosexuals are an abomination in the eyes of god, or that suicide is a mortal sin, or that god grants men dominion over women.

The problem when people use religion as a justification for any moral belief is that there is no way to prove them wrong, not even in theory, because their claims are not testable in the physical world. But religious people generally claim to get their morals from their religious beliefs, and as we've seen above, those morals then become the basis of the laws they try to have govern their country.

So there's no such thing as a person's religious beliefs being kept to themselves and not affecting others, as long as their beliefs inform their sense of morality. And there's no way to reconcile two opposing moral beliefs when they're based on religion. And this is quite often the situation we find ourselves in.

Where does this leave us? As an atheist, obviously I think that laws should not be based on religious beliefs. But we live in a world where most people still hold religious beliefs and think they are a valid source of morality. And as I made clear above, you can't have a stable society with laws that a significant number of people hold a moral objection to, whatever the basis of those moral beliefs.

The only real answer seems to be addressing religion itself. As long as people think it's okay to believe things based on faith, this problem will never go away. Anti-abortionists will feel 100% justified in their opposition to pro-choice laws. Many Muslims will feel that the death penalty is perfectly appropriate if someone tries to leave the religion (i.e. become an apostate). And anyone who thinks that faith is in any way a valid reason for holding certain moral beliefs really can't criticize any of these people without being a massive hypocrite.

13 Observations From A Newcomer To Edinburgh/UK

Note: This is a guest post authored by my awesome wife, Diana

I have been living in Edinburgh just over 6 months now, and I thought it would be fun to share my initial thoughts on things that have stood out for me for one reason or another. Maybe some of these things are just Edinburgh or Scotland specific and are different in the rest of the UK. This is not meant to be a newcomer’s guide to the UK.

Maybe it helps for you to understand these thoughts if you know that I have lived in various parts of Australia, and I lived 3 years in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. So it is not just from the perspective of someone who has never lived overseas before, but I have only lived in one other country, so I am not exactly an expert on these sorts of things, and if I was I would probably see these things I have noticed in a more balanced way.

You will probably notice that some things I am quite particular about for emotional/non-rational reasons, and so I'm not pretending that my position or point of view is always logical and well reasoned here, but that's not really the point of this post. I just want to present some of my reactions to things over here and I'm hoping others will find it interesting or amusing.

Anyway, let's get started...

13. My feet should not touch the end of the bed

Apparently a double size bed is the standard bed size for couples in the UK. Even some UK hotels will provide this size and it is a special thing if they have UK king size (Which is Aussie Queen size). I guess this is mainly due to smaller room sizes? Maybe if you never turn over and are deep sleepers, and are slim and short, and do not have pets that sleep in your bed, double size is fine for two people sleeping, but for me this size really reduces the quality of my sleep. And good quality sleep is really important to me and I don’t think I am alone on this.

We rent a furnished place as otherwise I would have bought a larger bed (the room is just barely big enough for a larger bed). But I am surprised that couples here seem ok with sleeping on a double bed. I guess something is wrong with me. Adam and I had a king size bed is Australia (UK super king size) and we had plenty of room and you could not notice if someone turned in bed, and there was even plenty of room for the cat. I guess with hot weather as well, you do not want to be close to someone else when trying to sleep. So maybe that is it, UK couples snuggle and if so that is great. But yeah, I look forward to sleeping in a larger bed again.

12. Trash bins in the streets

I get that Edinburgh is an old city, and it was built before they had to think about effective garbage removal, but seeing all the large black garbage bins in the streets makes the place look shitty (the bins are out there all the time, not just on rubbish collection day). I think it leads to more bits of rubbish being in the streets. This is not everywhere, and our newish apartment complex has a storeroom for the common garbage bins, but there are still plenty to be seen around Edinburgh. I guess this particularly bothers me as the place is so beautiful, so it seems such a shame to have big black garbage bins on the street ruining this. Maybe people here are used to seeing the bins and they do not even notice them anymore? I have noticed recently on Leith Walk they are trialling having the bins there only certain times during the week, when they are actually going to come around and empty the bins, and I think this has really improved the look of that road.

11. Power points in Bathrooms

I want to be able to dry my hair in the bathroom.

So, bathrooms can be small here, true. But apparently there is some rule about how there needs to be 1m between a power outlet and a water outlet (Or something like this), so this basically means very few bathrooms have any power outlets. They can have an outlet for shavers, and you can buy electric toothbrushes that can plug into these shaver outlets. So, from what I have heard most people just dry their hair in the bedroom.

I know they are trying to save me from electrocuting myself or someone I love. But I don’t care, I can handle a power point in the bathroom. I know my brother’s first apartment only had one power point and it was right up near the ceiling away from any water source, and you also needed a ladder to use it (maybe an exaggeration), so I guess Australia had something like this before. Aren’t there things you can install like a safety switch that stops electrocutions in houses anyway?

And a minor note, but do the shaver power outlets emit some kind of magic electricity that can't electrocute you? How is one type okay but not the other?

10. Mailboxes, you are doing it wrong

Actually I guess they are mail slots, because you basically get your mail delivered through a slot in the front door. For our place it is actually quite nosy when the mail gets delivered, the first few times it really scared me! What I understand even less about this, is that we live in an apartment which you need to either have a key or get someone to buzz you in to get inside, so how does the mailman get into the building? Does he have keys, or could anyone who buzzes and says they're the mailman get let in? Then why have security? Also, surely it annoys him having to walk up 3 flights of stairs to deliver my mail. Perhaps we can all agree having mailboxes at the front of apartments that we can also access with a key makes more sense.

9. Let me run free

One of my favourite things about Scotland is the freedom the average person has to walk on someone else’s land. The Pentland hills near Edinburgh are a great example of this. I won’t go too much into this, as I could write a whole other post on this topic. And I am sure most of you already know more about this than me, and if you don’t, google it!

I had this more or less at Lennox Head growing up. I use to walk on farmland, but I would have to climb through barbwire fences to do this (I got quite good at this) and I obviously was not meant to be walking on this land. But because I guess I was a bad child, I got to see some really beautiful parts around where I lived. Down the end of my street there was a bit of rainforest where there were vines me and my friends could swing on, but I had to get through barbwire fences to access this. So I really love the freedom to explore over here.

8. What’s all this about no sunshine?

Honestly it is not that cold, and not that cloudy. Maybe we have been really lucky with the weather, and I admit the sun setting at 3:30pm is a little soon, but this only lasts a short while, and in summer you get the sun setting at 10:30pm, so to me the trade-off is worth it. Maybe it is just because I love variety, and the weather and daylight hours vary quite a lot here. What bothered me was the endless sunshine and hot days without any rain in Perth. I really missed the rain. The cold is fine as you just have the proper clothes, and the heating in our home is great. I was way colder in my home in Perth in winter.

7. Scottish people are awesome

Yes, I know this is a generalisation, but you should be used to that now from me and meh!

Our first impression of a Scottish person in Scotland was our cab driver. He went out of his way to find exactly where our apartment was as we did not realize apartment number and street number are switched here when you write them (So 9/10 is unit 9 street number 10 in Australia , whereas here it is street number 9 apartment 10). We gave him a tip, and he handed back half of it as he said it was too much. Pretty much this first impression has held up. I feel really welcome here which is nice. Maybe I am actually not as welcome as I think, but I certainly feel like I am.

6. Castles, for real

Castles for us are such a novelty. We love roaming through them. We get as excited about castles as we do about snow. I am very glad that so much effort and money has been put into keeping these amazing buildings accessible to the public.

5. That was not food

The quality range here can really vary. My impression is that things are a little more expensive in Germany but you have better quality. We had some Toad in the Holes (admittedly this was frozen food) heated up in the oven and I have never felt so ill from eating something in my life (except when I have gotten food poising). I have no idea what type of meat they used but it was such bad quality. Maybe we should have known better, and maybe you all know better. Maybe all frozen meat products are a no go here. I do not know. Adam and I have frozen vegetarian meat as part of our lunches now.

4. Pierogi my favourite

So apparently there is quite a large Polish community here, there are Polish speciality shops all over the place. And we totally win from this as I love Polish food. I can get a pack of mushroom and sauerkraut pierogi from the local supermarket for £1-1.50 (AUD2-3.00 roughly). Bargain! My background is Ukrainian, Polish and Belarussian (or as Adam says it does not matter, and I guess I tend to agree), and my grandma use to make varenyky which is more or less the same as pierogi. I would like to make it too, but it is too time consuming. So it is nice to get it (or something close enough) so easily here. Now if only I could get cabbage rolls like my grandmother use to make…she was the best cook.

я голодний

Hope that translation was correct, I know how to say it, I don’t know how to write it. (It says "I am hungry!")

3. Not hot chips with meals, what?

Just so there is no confusion, I mean what you call crisps in the UK or potato chips in Australia. We have had a few times now when we have ordered a sandwich at a café where it would come with a few potato chips or corn chips on the plate. We have never had this before, and we think it is the strangest thing. But I guess do hot chips make more sense? Yes, yes they do! Or else you might as well throw a few Gummi Bears on the side if you're going to head down that path!

2. Washing, washing everywhere

It seems so odd to me that dryers are common in Australia but they are not in the UK, not even laundries seem common. In some units/apartments in Australia they do not have a separate laundry, but they will have something within the bathroom, like a cupboard with the washing machine and dryer behind it. Maybe this comes back to the lack of power points in the bathroom… and smaller sized places in general. In Germany we had a communal laundry room where we could all put our washing machines and dryers.

With the unpredictable rain, you cannot really hang your washing up outside here (There is not even the option where we rent), so the only option for our case, and I think this is common in the UK, is to air dry your clothes inside your home. So this means almost all the time we have two clothes racks with washing drying. From what I have seen new places are also being built without a laundry, and with the washing machine in the kitchen.  Why! Does it honestly not bother UK residents? I have seen some larger homes will have a laundry, so maybe having a laundry is a rich person thing here? I think maybe it would be fine to dry your clothes inside if you were one person, and you could open the windows to have airflow remove the dampness. But with it being 0 degrees outside, I do not really want the windows open all the time.

1. Tiny deathtrap bathrooms

They seem to love having the shower in the bathtub here. I think this is a US thing too. In Australia, only cheap places (Or maybe old ones) have the shower in the bathtub in the main bathroom. We tend to have a separate shower. Bathtubs are slippery, the shower curtain sticks to you, and it’s cold! With a shower with glass doors you are in this warm, safe box. I don’t know how old people manage to step into these bathtub/shower combo’s. In Australia, if there is a lack of space, they will only have a shower and not bathtub. The main plus of the shower/bathtub combo is not having to clean the grout. But to me, that is it.

Because the bathrooms are so small, the sinks tend to be right up next to the toilet, virtually to the point that you could be going to the toilet while leaning over the sink and brushing your teeth at the same time. I can't even imagine what this does for hygiene, but I know Adam is not overly impressed putting contact lenses in and out of his eyes two feet from a toilet bowl!

We tend to dislike the trend of putting toilets in bathrooms in general, but over here it's almost like they built the bathroom at a size intended only for a bath and sink, and then just decided to jam a toilet in there because they've been playing too much Tetris or something.

Atheism and Belief

I've seen many atheists try to distance themselves from the concept of 'belief'. They will tend to argue that atheism isn't a belief, but rather the lack of belief. They will say that an atheist doesn't believe that there is no god, but rather lacks any belief that there is one. They will point to the infinite possible things that may or may not exist, and say that you don't explicitly believe that these things do not exist, but rather that you don't hold a belief unless there is evidence to support it.

I understand why many atheists head down this path of reasoning. It's a common debating tactic of religious people to claim that atheism is 'just another religion' or 'just another belief', implicitly or explicitly trying to remove any claim atheism has to being more truthful or rational than all the religious belief systems.

Now it's certainly true that atheism isn't a religion. However you want to define a religion, it really doesn't seem that atheism will fit the bill, since it's purely the belief that there is no god. There are no other core 'tenets' to atheism. While many atheists will tend towards similar moral principles and beliefs (such as humanism), these are not part of atheism itself, just like most atheists accept that evolution is true, but evolution is not a tenet of atheism.

The problem I have is with atheists trying to distance themselves from the concept of 'belief'. I'm yet to meet an atheist who doesn't actually hold the belief that there is no god, whether they consciously realize that they hold this belief or not, and here I hope to explain why this is the case.

Reasons For Belief

I think the underlying problem is that people misunderstand what a 'belief' is, thinking that it somehow implies either refusal to change your opinion if you get counter evidence, or that it means thinking something is true without evidence. But a belief can be a perfectly scientific and rational concept. We all hold beliefs on countless different things: whether humans are causing climate change; whether gravity exists; whether it's safe to drink the water out of your tap; whether your next door neighbour is a nice person. These are all beliefs, and we will hold them to different degrees, based on our reasons for holding them.

The strength of your belief in something will be based on how solid you think your reasons are for that belief. This is true regardless of the particular type of reason. What are the possible types?

• Evidence is the obvious one, with the scientific method being the route of choice for evaluating evidence. It's not perfect, but based on results it seems to be the best way we have for testing beliefs against real world data and separating out what is likely to be true from what is likely to be false.
• Faith is the other big one, where people will explicitly admit that they don't have evidence for their belief, but choose to hold it anyway, for whatever their justification is.
• Authority is another common one, and is interesting because it can fall in between evidence and faith. Ideally we would never rely on authority and always insist on evidence, but in practice we often have to. For instance, I will tend to rely on the authority of an expert like Richard Dawkins or Lawrence Krauss or The National Health and Medical Research Council to help determine my beliefs about things within their areas of expertise. On its face this looks like faith, and to a degree it is. But my trust is not based on blind whim or just wanting them to be right, it's based on evidence having supported their previous claims, which increases confidence that they are reliable on other issues within their area of expertise, combined with the fact that I know I can look for specific evidence on these things if I want to. I'm never required to take their word on faith; I'm just using that as a shortcut because I don't have the time to look into the evidence for everything in my world that may or may not be true.

So, for a rational person, the strength of their belief in something will be based on the strength of evidence to support it. This can range from near certainty for extremely well supported theories like general relativity or evolution, or well refuted theories like phlogiston (look it up) or the moon landings being faked. You implicitly use the same method to determine what constitutes a healthy diet, or if your partner is cheating on you, or what the fastest route is to get to work.

(Note that the scientific definition of a fact is generally considered to be something that is so well supported that it would be perverse to deny it. So it's not really anything qualitatively different from a belief, just something so well supported that you'd basically need a damn good reason to expect anyone to waste time questioning it; time is limited and we've all got better things to do!)

I Think Therefore I Believe

But here is the key thing about belief: as soon as you ask yourself whether or not you believe something, you now hold a belief about it.

Up to now, you will not have held a belief one way or the other about whether or not an orange unicorn named Shirley is happily living at the top of Mount Everest, but as soon as I pose the question of whether you believe it or not, you now hold a belief. You effectively weigh up the evidence you have for and against it (which would include things as specific as whether you've heard of this exact thing before to more general things such as knowledge about whether unicorns exist and the survivability of the peak of Mount Everest) and decide whether you believe it is true or believe it is false (hopefully the latter).

The strength of this belief can vary by all kinds of degrees, but you're going to believe something about it, somewhere along the spectrum from absolute certainty that it's false to absolute certainty that it's true. You would have to be the blankest of slates to have absolutely no opinion one way or the other, to have absolutely no knowledge that would make you lean even slightly one way or the other.

So when you ask an atheist what his belief is regarding the existence of a god, the fact of the matter is that this particular belief is not the same as the infinite other possible things that may or may not exist, because he has specifically pondered it. In reality, if you believe that the evidence at all leans towards there being some kind of higher power, then you are a theist, even if you think the evidence is very weak. And if you at all lean towards there not being any kind of higher power, then you are an atheist, and you believe that there is no god. This belief may be weak; you will of course be willing to change it if you are presented with good evidence to the contrary; but it's a belief, not the absence of one.

And this holds true for anyone taking an agnostic stance too. Agnosticism is just the belief that it's not possible to prove the existence of a god one way or the other. This is completely separate to whether you believe a god exists or not. You can hold beliefs without the hope of ever having definitive proof, and quite often you have to do so because you usually have to take action in life with incomplete information. Whether you can get definitive proof or not is generally a moot point because we have to act without definitive proof most of the time.

Consider whether it is knowable or not that the water in your tap is safe to drink. In theory it's knowable, but in practice you do not have certainty and never will. But you either drink it or you don't, and that says what your belief is on the issue. Is your car safe to drive? If you drive it, then you believe it is (to some degree). Can you fly? If you jump off a building and flap your arms then you believe that you can (at least strongly enough to risk your life over it). Do you believe in a god? If you act in a way that you would not if you did not (such as praying or making moral arguments based on sin or the existence of souls), then you believe it. Knowability is just not really relevant in practice.

Conclusion

So I hope with all the previous rambling I've made a reasonable case that 'lack of belief' is really not what atheists have, and that any atheists who read this are more willing to own their actual beliefs without feeling that it compels them to make any claims to certainty, or equates beliefs based on evidence with beliefs based on faith. And for any theists who read this, I hope I've made it a bit clearer that you effectively apply reason and evidence to 100 different things every day, and maybe start to apply the same to your opinions on religion and the existence of supernatural beings.