there's nothing magical about fathers

The Guardian reports on the discussion of whether lesbian couples should be allowed IVF treatment:

But "there's nothing magical about fathers," says Susan Golombok, professor of family research and director of the Centre for Family Research at the University of Cambridge, and co-author of Growing Up in a Lesbian Family. "Fathers who are very involved with their children are good for children. But fathers who are not very involved - they aren't as important, and can even have a negative effect. It's a very simplistic notion to think that fathers are important just because they're male."

Don't boys need male role models? "The thing is that fathers make absolutely no difference to their children's development of masculinity or femininity," she says. "Studies that have looked at single-parent families have not found that boys are less masculine or girls less feminine. In fact, it seems that parents make very little difference to the masculinity or femininity of their sons and daughters. The peer group is more important, and the stereotypes that are around them in their day-to-day life. Even in families where parents try hard to influence their children's gender developent, where they try to stop their sons being very masculine, for example, and try to make them more gender-neutral, actually find that whatever they do makes no difference whatsoever. Fathers are important more in terms of emotional wellbeing, not in terms of role models."

As for the lesbian issue, says Golombok, "There's now been more than 30 years of research in Europe and the US, that has found very consistently that children raised in a lesbian household are no different from children in heterosexual families, both in terms of their psychological adjustment, and also in terms of their gender development, and in terms of their relationships with other children.

In (neo-, meso- and paleo-) Pagan societies, there are and were many models of bringing up children (and many models of gender). Some tribal societies don't bother to keep track of who is the father of which child; some are patrilineal, some are matrilineal. In India, they have a saying that "It takes a whole village to bring up a child." We should be much more worried about the loss of the extended family, and the tribal community in which a child can get advice and help from any member of the community, not just its parents. The 'nuclear family' model seemingly advocated by the Conservative party is claustrophobic and probably dangerous to children on the grounds that abusive practices can happen within the four walls of the home without anyone else finding out (especially if the family is outwardly respectable). Other traditional societies have extended families to share childcare. Even if a child did need a role model of the same gender (which Professor Golombok's research seems to show is unnecessary), you could aways have a gay couple and a lesbian couple sharing the parenting.

So we need to rethink our society's model of what a family is; and we also need to rethink the primary position we give to gender in considerations of many issues where it is irrelevant.

Of course, individual dads may well be very magical indeed - but it's not their maleness that makes them so, but their unique style of parenting.

disestablishment and pluralism

Rethinking religion in an open society
Though the role of religion in society has come back onto the agenda with a vengeance in recent years, the political, spiritual and intellectual resources at our disposal for handling the issues involved seem perilously thin on all sides in public life. This paper aims to reconstruct some key terms in the debate and to offer a positive case for a 'disestablished' form for religion within a plural social and political order. In particular it suggests that the alternative to hegemonic religion or attempts to exclude religion from public life lies in the rediscovery of an alternative form of politics rooted in practical 'goods' and 'virtues' derived from different communities and traditions, accompanied by the development of a 'civil state' framework.

I would recommend reading this, regardless of whether you are an atheist or a person with a religion or a spiritual path.

In this article, Simon Barrow takes a long hard look at the current debate on who gets to keep control over public life, and tries to move beyond the over-simplified "atheists versus religionists" picture peddled by the media.

I think he is right that we are now in 'post-Christendom' and I think this is a good thing. I think Christianity lost its claim to credibility when it got into bed with the Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire, and ceased to be a radical critique of the status quo at that point.

Likewise, ancient paganism lost its credibility (in modern eyes, anyway) when it became a state religion where you had to sacrifice to the numen of the Emperor. All the excitement was located in the mystery religions.

Theocracy is a bad idea anywhere - established religion is always a conservative force, because it is run by the rich and powerful, who have a vested interest in preserving the status quo. It's the small radical groups like Quakers, Unitarians, the Metropolitan Community Church, Soulforce, Wiccans, eco-Pagans, Sufis, Hasidim that challenge inequality and promote justice (for LGBT people, peace, the environment, etc.)

Recently some Pagans have started to liaise with the government over various issues, which is great, but the problem is that the government wants Pagans to "speak with one voice" and I don't see how we can do this, when there are many different Pagans with many different agendas and ideas. I guess we can try to reach a consensus among ourselves and then relay that to the government, but owing to the distributed nature of Pagan networks and communities, it is difficult to canvass everyone's opinion.

What Simon Barrow suggests instead of the established church is a polity based on values and virtues instead of beliefs - an eminently sensible idea, and something that is compatible with many religions, including Paganism, Unitarianism, and Buddhism, to name a few - all of which are based on values and not on beliefs. There is disagreement about beliefs both within and between traditions, but most people can agree on a set of values and civic virtues - inclusivity, tolerance, social welfare, justice, equity, charity (all good Heathen and Roman virtues), and so on.

He does not mention Paganism (though he does mention small new religions and non-aligned spirituality), and so I wonder what his proposed model might be like for Pagans - I think it would be a good thing, because it would be based on values which we can all subscribe to, and there might be less of the governmental mindset that insists on consulting one specific religious organisation and assuming that it represents the views of everyone in that group. It could also mean that Christianity might no longer be seen as a model that other religions must be like, or conform to, in order to be regarded as religions.

the darkness at the end of the paradigm

The other day we went to a very thought-provoking talk by Jocelyn Bell Burnell (the discoverer of pulsars) at the Bath Science Café at The Raven.

There was talk of dark matter and dark energy, which are basically 'dark' in the sense that no-one knows what they are. We do know that dark matter is probably non-baryonic, unlike most matter in the universe. (Baryonic matter is matter with protons and neutrons in the nucleus.)

So, she said, there will be a paradigm shift when the nature of dark matter and dark energy is discovered.

There was a similar paradigm shift when it was finally realised that phlogiston didn't exist. Natural philosophers studying burning materials assumed that, since they gained weight after burning, they must be emitting a substance that had negative mass; they called this substance phlogiston. Joseph Priestley almost had it right when he produced "phlogisticated air" (air that, he believed, was rich in phlogiston), but it was Antoine Lavoisier who realised that phlogiston didn't exist, and that rather than losing a substance with negative mass, the burning material was actually fixing oxygen out of the air. The theory of phlogiston may seem daft now, but it made sense at a time when it was assumed that air was all one substance, not several different gases mixed together. (I remember watching a video about this in O-level Chemistry.)

Another paradigm shift that Professor Bell Burnell told us about occurred in astronomy when looking at planetary orbits; it was assumed they were circular, but then people observed anomalies in them and called them epicycles, and it all got very untidy until Johannes Kepler pointed out that the orbits were elliptical.

And of course the most famous paradigm shift of all was the one when Copernicus pointed out that we live in a heliocentric solar system, not a geocentric one.

At least nowadays you are not likely to get burnt at the stake or kept under house arrest for suggesting a radical new scientific idea. The worst thing that could happen to you is loss of tenure.

The point of all this is to say that, although there is speculation as to what dark matter and dark energy might be, it may be that something else is wrong, such as the basic assumptions which led to the need to theorise their existence, in which case whatever is causing the need to insert them into the theoretical models turns out to be something completely different. In a hundred years' time, people could be laughing at those early 21st century scientists who believed in 'dark matter' and 'dark energy', in the same way that we find phlogiston, flat earth theory and geocentric cosmology amusing nowadays. Such is the weirdness when we're sitting on the brink of a paradigm shift. Maybe a bit like sitting at the event horizon of a black hole - nothing will ever be the same again once you have passed the threshold.