'Doing God' is not about sucking up to the religious

| Jonathan Bartley | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

In its literal sense "doing God" is a theological nonsense. Something that is omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient cannot be contained, utilised or otherwise actioned. Christianity itself suggests you can only really respond to an invitation to join in what God is already doing.

It may sound like semantics, or the kind of meaningless discussion about how many angels you can fit on the head of a pin. It is actually an important distinction. Some try to "do God" according to their own often controlling and narrow agenda, making God in their own image. But others may "do God", recognising that they can't call the shots, as God's agenda is somewhat larger and more important than their own.

The difference between the two approaches tends to involve alternative ideas of where God can be found. For the former, God tends to be hanging out in the obviously religious things. When both politicians and the religious talk about "doing God", they invariably mean the contribution of faith groups, support for faith schools, resourcing for religious projects, exemptions and opt-outs from equality laws for faith-based organisations and general niceness to religious people and their institutions.

But that's not "doing God". That's "doing religion" – and doing it badly. And, as such, reinforces a religious-secular divide, which makes God very small indeed and ignores the idea that God might be found in all sorts of other places.

What was refreshing about Tony Blair and Gordon Brown was that they seemed to sometimes get the bigger picture. Both repeatedly referred to their own faith as something that shaped their sociopolitical outlook and led them in their attempts to form policy for the benefit of the most vulnerable, who, Christian tradition has it, God hangs out with. Where they failed – sometimes monumentally – was in their interpretation of how God might help them. You would be hard pushed to make the case that the God – at least revealed in Jesus Christ – was up for invading Iraq, however much Blair might have felt he had prayed about it.

Another failing of the Blair-Brown era was to allow the churches to "do them". Churches and religious pressure groups repeatedly mount the case at elections that religious people can determine the outcome. And, in doing so, they reinforce the unhelpful approach to "doing God", making themselves into an interest group to be appeased, a constituency whose narrow self-interests must be met.

So what should Ed Miliband's new approach be to faith? Stephen Timms suggests that Labour's "relationship with faith groups will not be primarily about winning votes. We need to work with religious groups because they are a source of values and our natural allies in the fight for justice." Setting aside this rather optimistic view of politics, this kind of argument doesn't hold up entirely either. There are good values and there are bad values. Both can be found in religious communities. And good and bad values also come from outside religious communities, too.

As Timms shows in his own argument, "doing God" often also assumes that the religious can be pushed into one block and treated as the same. They can't. Yes, Timms is absolutely right to highlight the drive from the churches around campaigns of trade justice, and Make Poverty History. But the religious don't have a monopoly on such values. Again, to believe that they do is to fall into the sacred-secular dualism, which maintains that anyone who doesn't have a faith can't have good moral values. Such a belief is, of course, contrary to the teachings of Christianity, which maintains that all have a moral sense, being made in God's image.

But if the history of Christianity, and indeed its teachings, tell us anything it is that often what God wants isn't particularly religious. "Doing God" should involve challenging religion as much as supporting it. If God is found with the excluded, then "doing God" would mean challenging faith schools to be more inclusive and end their discrimination against the non-religious. If God is found with the powerless, it would mean kicking appointed bishops out of the House of Lords and asking them to stand for political office, just like everyone else. If God is with the disadvantaged, it would mean ending unfair privileges for religious institutions.

Doing God – or more accurately joining in with what God is doing – is not about sucking up to the religious, or supporting what they do. It is about doing what is right. People of faith believe, after all, that all those who do right, are doing God's work whether they realise it or not.

So Miliband should "do God" in the sense that he should take on the churches and other faith groups where they act unjustly, and work with them when they work for justice. But he certainly shouldn't be taken in by the myth that they can deliver him the next election.

Must politicians do God?

Piggybacking on religion doesn't work | Polly Toynbee | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Must politicians do God? It was odd that as the country grew more secular, so New Labour front benches contained rather more churchgoers than before, and fewer who dared profess the outright atheism of the Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins, Tony Crosland generation. Goodness knows what Gordon Brown actually believes, but he banged on about being imbued with his minister father's values so often that he risked raising the old man from the grave to admonish him. He was, as ever, trying to mimic Tony Blair, the undergraduate Christian convert on his journey to Rome. "We don't do God" was the sort of denial that got St Peter into trouble. He certainly did God, but in ways too mysterious to be understood by his electorate.

Nick Clegg announced his atheism – only to panic under pressure and politely rebrand it agnosticism. David Cameron is an archetypal Conservative social churchgoer – no alarming enthusiasm of the Blair variety, but a flicker of belief, he says elegantly, that comes and goes like reception from his local radio station.

But Ed Miliband is straightforward – an atheist born and bred, no pretending. Will he be punished for it? The answer to that question is a good proxy for a great many other questions about him. Can he be who he is, say what he thinks and avoid trimming to please target groups? Can he earn respect for authenticity and authority or these days do all politicians have to strain to be all things to all people? My hunch is that times have changed. After the MPs' expenses scandal, people feel contempt for politicians they think will do anything to gain and keep power. They may welcome a straighttalker. If I'm wrong, how depressing for the future of politics.

With his good listening habit and openness to new ideas, this humanist does human very well. Lack of religious belief may earn him more credit than the uneasy suspicion that Blair thought he had a private hotline to God, or that Brown was a religious phoney, faking it.

To be an atheist is not to disrespect people with religious beliefs. But it does suggest he will not afford religion a special status as Blair and Brown were inclined to. Religious groups are such tempting prey for politicians, hungrily eyeing all those people gathered together in pews or on prayer mats every week, listening to sermons. MPs worrying how to reach a nebulous "community" seize on any concrete group as a possible conduit for political messages. But trying to piggyback on churches or mosques doesn't tend to work: religious movements have their own various agendas and they try equally hard to make use of politicians for their own devices.

In truth, they inhabit separate universes – both in their way concerned with the great moral issues of the day. But great eternal religious certainties are often a bad fit with the everyday compromises of politics, inching along the path towards small improvements. If Miliband recognises these essential incompatibilities, he may find it easier to deal honestly with believers of all hues.

74 months and counting...............

| Andrew Simms | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Yesterday, the Royal Society, the voice in the UK for the scientific establishment, published a new general public guide to the science of climate change. It covers areas of general agreement, broad consensus where there is still some debate and aspects that are still not fully understood. The nature of scientific enquiry is such that there is no such thing as absolute certainty, merely explanations of the world that are waiting to be disproved.

But, if deniers of human-driven climate change were hoping for rare succour, they will be disappointed. The Royal Society guide is wholly supportive of the mainstream view of climate science. Humanity is dangerously altering the climate through the bad management of natural resources, overconsumption and the generation of waste. The chair of the IPCC, the group of scientists representing that mainstream view, recently took criticism. A broadcast journalist found some environmentalists prepared to agree with the suggestion that he should not complete a second term of office. Others, who were not reported, did not agree. The crime to be answered was defending too aggressively the IPCC's work, and the need for urgent action on the basis of what is known.

In spite of some of the more peculiar assumptions behind economic models, we never possess "perfect information". And absolute certainty is a condition more closely associated with fundamentalist religions, rather than the circumstances under which we daily have to make choices and take decisions.

This is the point: we make judgements on the balance of probabilities. And, as we stand on current greenhouse gas emissions trends and the scientific establishment's cautious assessment of risk, along with further cautious estimates of how damaging "feedback" will happen in key ecosystems, we have 74 months before the accumulation of greenhouse gases makes it more, rather than less likely we will become committed to cross the dangerous 2C temperature rise. Choices have to be made.

Yes, of course there are unknowns. Ecosystems could react badly, and much quicker to warming. Or some unforeseen events – such as a deep and long global recession – might slow things down. But while, as in medicine, a false positive diagnosis may be an inconvenience, a false negative one can be lethal.

On a beach in Phuket, Thailand, during Christmas 2004, a 10-year-old British schoolgirl suddenly remembered her geography lesson of two weeks before. The water looked different and was behaving oddly. It was just like the signs she'd been taught were the messengers of an impending tsunami.

Everyone else was out for a good time on a sunny day on the beach – who wanted to listen to a young, increasingly desperate girl? But she trusted her judgement, the best knowledge she had gained from her science lesson, and finally persuaded her mother who had helped with her geography homework. In turn, they persuaded the lifeguard and the beach was cleared, saving about 100 lives on a day when possibly a quarter of a million died.

On a different continent, and in a very different situation, James Hansen, the Nasa climate scientist, took a similar risk. He put his reputation and establishment credentials in jeopardy and was prepared to be arrested in a public demonstration against the use of fossil fuels.

"The most revolutionary thing one can do," wrote the radical intellectual Rosa Luxemburg, "is always to proclaim loudly what is happening." She both lived and died by these words, being murdered for speaking out.

Now we have as leader of the UK's official political opposition, Ed Miliband, the first-ever former minister for climate change. He is running on the ticket of the new generation. Unless his policy package contains measures to push action at the scale and speed to stay comfortably on the right side of the 2C climate threshold, his new generation may also be the last to live in a world not tormented by universal environmental upheaval. This is now an age when the greatest risk will be not taking any.

• Take action and visit onehundredmonths.org

Latin America needs to learn from China to secure future economic growth

The fragile bit of Bric | Kevin Gallagher | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Over the past 30 years, both China and nations across Latin America have sought to move away from inward looking economic models and integrate into the world economy. In 1980, the collective economic output of Latin America was seven times as large as that of China. Now, China's economy is larger than all of the economies in Latin America combined.

In the process of leapfrogging over Latin America, China has tugged some Latin American economies along with it, but the longer run implications could prove less favourable. China's rise has been good for Latin America over the past decade. The region's exports to China jumped nine times between 2000 and 2009 in real terms, far outpacing the Latin America's overall export growth. In 2009, Latin American exports to China reached $41.3bn, almost 7% of all Latin American exports. The pre-financial crisis peak, 2006, for exports to China was $22.3bn.

These trends have helped spur economic growth in Latin America not only because China is an export destination, but also because Chinese demand constrains global supply and thus raises the price that Latin American's receive for exports from other trading partners as well. However, this windfall has not been widely shared. As I show in my new book with Uruguayan political economist Roberto Porzecanski, The Dragon in the Room: China and the Future of Latin American Industrialisation: five countries and a handful of sectors generated just over 80% of all regional exports to China. China is, in part, fuelled by iron and copper ores, crude oil and soybeans from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Peru. Chinese foreign investment, now totalling over $30bn, has flowed in large part to the same countries and sectors.

In the longer-run future, it is not clear whether China will be a sustained source of demand for Latin American commodities. Even if China does maintain its appetite for Latin American commodities, the consequences may not all be beneficial. China could accentuate Latin America's (over)reliance on commodities exports and jeopardise the region's capabilities for diversifying its export basket toward manufactures and modern services. Not to mention that it could cause long-lasting social and environmental effects.

For example, between 1995 and 2009, Brazilian soy production quadrupled, in part due to the fact that approximately half all Brazilian soy exports went to China. At the same time, employment in the soy sector shrank as cultivation became highly mechanised. Moreover, increased demand for soy has been linked to the deforestation of some 528,000 square kilometers in the Brazilian Amazon. Such deforestation has threatened the livelihoods of many indigenous Brazilians and contributed to accentuating global climate change.

When conducting our research, we found that nearly all of the exports from Latin America and Caribbean are "under threat" from China. Drawing on previous work from the Asian Development Bank, we characterise a threat as those products in world markets where China's market share is increasing, while the market share of Latin America and the Caribbean is either decreasing or static. We find that 92% of Latin American manufacturing exports fall under threat from China, representing 39% of the region's total exports.

China is not to blame. These trends are largely the result of policies taken by Latin American countries. Many adopted "shock therapy" or the "Washington Consensus". Governments rapidly liberalised trade and investment regimes and reduced the role of the state in economic affairs, often through privatisations that, in a number of cases, went painfully awry.

China has taken a more gradual approach to integrating with world markets. In contrast to Latin America, China embarked on a programme of economic reform aiming at strategic integration into the world economy by following a "dual track" policy. This consisted of liberalising foreign investment and in-flow of imported inputs to selected industries, while buttressing those sectors to the point of maturity and nurturing other sectors until they were ready to face competition with imports.

Latin America would do well to learn lessons from China, especially in the realm of industrial development, and to ramp up some of its homebred innovations. There are some encouraging signs. Brazil's development bank has begun to take industrialisation seriously again. Chile houses a stabilisation fund that skims some of its copper revenues and hoards them for dips in demand and prices, while freeing funds for modest environmental protection. Exports to China – and China's general example – could be an opportunity for Latin America. Or not.

Punishment does not fit crimes with the most victims

 | Ben Goldacre | Comment is free | The Guardian

 

Like all students of wrongness, I'm fascinated by research into irrational beliefs and behaviours, but I'm also suspicious of how far you can stretch the findings from a laboratory into the real world. A cracking paper from Social Psychology and Personality Science makes a neat attempt to address this shortcoming.

Loran Nordgren and Mary McDonnell wanted to see whether we perceive a crime as being more serious when more people are affected. Sixty students were given an article about a fraud case; in one version three people were defrauded by a financial adviser, in a second, 30. All other information in the story was the same in both versions.

You might imagine that someone who harmed more people would be deemed to deserve harsher treatment. But asked to evaluate the severity of the crime and recommend a punishment, participants who read the story with three victims rated the crime as more serious than those who read the same story with 30 victims.

More than that, they acted on this view: out of a maximum sentence of 10 years, people who read the three-victim story recommended an average prison term one year longer than the 30-victim readers. Another study, in which a food processing company knowingly poisoned customers to avoid bankruptcy, gave similar results.

It's nice that they did two studies of the same idea, but I always worry about experiments like this, because they demonstrate an effect in the rarefied environment of the laboratory, while the real world can be much more complicated.

But this paper has two halves: the authors then go on to examine the sentences in a representative sample of 136 real world court cases, in which people were found guilty of these kinds of crimes but with varying numbers of victims, to see what impact the victim-count had.

The results were depressing. These were cases between 2000-2009 in which individuals from corporations had been found guilty by juries of negligently exposing members of the public to substances such as asbestos, lead paint or toxic mould, and their victims had all suffered significantly. The researchers' hypothesis was correct: people who harm larger numbers of people get significantly lower punitive damages than people who harm a smaller number. Courts punish people less harshly when they harm more people.

It seems to me that alternative explanations may play a contributory role: cases where lots of people were harmed may involve larger companies, with more expensive and competent lawyers, for example, or larger and more deniable lines of responsibility. But in the light of their earlier experiment, it's hard to discount the contributory effect of empathy, and this is a phenomenon we all recognise.

When he appeared on Desert Island Discs, Rolf Harris told the story of his song "Two Little Boys". His uncle died in the war, but Rolf's dad always believed that if they'd only been in the same infantry unit, he could have crawled out and pulled his little brother to safety, just like in the song. Instead he lay, bleeding to death from his injuries, and died above the trench. Rolf played Two Little Boys to his grandmother once. She sat through it quietly, took it off at the end, and said: "Please don't ever play that to me again."

I'm sure it's lame of me, I realise it may not press your own personal buttons, but this story made me cry a tiny bit. Two million people die of Aids every year. It never has the same effect.

 

via ScribeFire