Rimsha Masih and the problem of respectable religions

My first post was about my book, ‘Of Assassins and Kings’, my second was on the controversial fall in GCSE grades, so, staying true to the title of this blog my third shall be about Atheism.

Rimsha Masih, I wonder how many of you have heard that name; I first heard it this morning on The Young Turks. She is young girl living in Islamabad, Pakistan, about a week ago she was arrested on the charge of blasphemy and is now being held in solitary confinement partly for her own protection after she was attacked and beaten by a Muslim mob shortly before her arrest. Her supposed crime; ripping a few pages out of the Koran. Reports vary as to her age and mental state, most say 11, some say 14 or 16 and a few claim she has Down syndrome. What is not in dispute is that a young girl, a child, has been threatened, beaten, arrested and traumatized for ripping some pages from a book.

This is not the first time this kind of thing has happened in Pakistan, harsh Islamic blasphemy laws mean that anyone can be accused and arrested, facing a death penalty if convicted. Fortunately this barbaric punishment has not yet been inflicted upon anyone but it’s only a matter of time. Unless something is done, one day, it won’t be an arrest or a riot on the news, it will be an execution and perhaps Rimsha will be the first.

Religion asks for our respect, all religions, not just the extremists, demand unconditional respect and reverence for their beliefs. They do not understand that respect is not given, it is not a right, it has to be earned. I for one refuse to respect anything which can be used to justify the barbarism shown to Rimsha Masih.

And it is not just extremist Muslims who deserve our disdain and condemnation, it is all religion, Catholicism, moderate Islam, Anglicanism and Judaism, because all religion is to blame. They may not have been in the mob beating an 11 year old girl but they have created a world in which such a thing can happen. Religion gets a free pass and it has for too long, and it will continue to get that free pass so long as mainstream moderate religion exists and demands respect for its beliefs and holy texts. Anglicanism is probably the most innocuous of the mainstream religions, yet even it is in a small way responsible, because it cultivates this attitude of respect for religion.

The Catholic Church is currently fighting the legalisation of same sex marriage in Scotland. If any politician expressed the same sentiment, sighting their private beliefs as the justification, they would be shouted down and rejected as a homophobic bigot. But when the same sentiment is expressed by church men, garbed in the respectability of religion, they are taken seriously and anyone who questions them is told they are being intolerant of peoples private beliefs, private beliefs that must apparently be imposed on the whole of society. And while priests in Scotland preach from the pulpit the message that same sex marriage is a crime against god, Imams shout from the minarets of Islamabad, inciting a mob to attack a young girl for ripping up a book.

So if you are religious and you think your religion is harmless, think about Rimsha Masih alone in a Pakistani jail, too scared to talk, and ask yourself if your religion is worth the life and happiness of even one girl.

GCSE Recession!

Today’s top head line in every newspaper has been the surprise fall in GCSE results. For the first time since 1988 when they were introduced, the results have gone down. If you read any of the national newspapers you might think this was some kind of disaster or conspiracy with heart rending stories of children who just missed out and letters from distraught teaches, telling the government about how their pupils worked hard and deserved better, there is even some talk of lawsuits against exam boards.

I myself, and I suspect the government, intent to take the long view and discuss these results as part of a whole. When one does this, it becomes very clear that the dip is not so much a tumble over a sheer cliff, as it is a stumble over a small step. So without further ado, let’s get down to some hard figures.

This year the results fell by an average of 0.4 %. That means that this year, 69.4% of entries attained grade A*- C as opposed to 69.8% in 2011. Figures like these are always open to misinterpretation when taken out of context, so here’s the context.

In 1988 42.5 % of entrants received an A*- C grade. As you can see this steadily rose over the next 23 years, reaching a peak in 2011 at 69.8%. That is a 27.3% increase over 23 years which is frankly ridiculous. Taken as a proportion of the original 42.5% the increase in the number of students attaining grade A*- C is 27.3/42.5 x 100 = 64.2

A 64.2% increase in the number of students receiving grade A*- C can only be accounted for by grade inflation, primarily due to competition between exam boards. Some of it will be a result of improved teaching methods and curriculum along with a better standard of text books. This might account for a 5-10 % increase in the proportion of students receiving grade A*- C, as the bumps in the system were smoothed out, it cannot account for a 27.3% increase.

Put simply, in a well-run system, you would expect a slight increase as teachers, textbook writers and examiners adjusted to the new system. But then you would expect to see the results level off and remain fairly constant, fluctuating by 0.5-1% per year.

The fact is that whilst there have been accusations of late stage grade fixing by exam boards under pressure from the government, the real grade fixing  occurred over the past 20 years. It wasn’t malicious or even particularly deliberate, but simply an inescapable result of the current system; where independent exam boards are selected by each school. In this system, schools have an obvious incentive to select the easiest exams for their students, which gives the independent exam boards an incentive to compete to set the easiest exams. This can only lead to grade inflation, the latest fall in insignificant in comparison.

The real world implications of this dip have also been exaggerated. Figures for the number of student affected are hard to calculate, but it would seem that approximately 4000 students missed out on a grade C in English, receiving a D grade instead. This should not be ignored, as some of these students will no doubt suffer career wise. This is only for one subject but even extrapolating for other subject one would still end up with a relatively small number compared to the total number of entrants, approximately 1205000.

The secondary affect relates the schools themselves, some of which may be forced to close for not meeting government standards. These require that 40% of students receive five GCSE’s grade C and above. Frankly I have very little sympathy for these schools, if they cannot get 40% of their students to attain what is considered by many to be the minimum requirement in-order to proceed to higher education, then they are already failed schools, and any system that allows them to survive does a disservice to the students who could be better educated at schools which give a dam.

The last point one should remember about GCSE’s is that they are not there to give an absolute measure of a person’s abilities, that’s what university is for. GCSE’s are there to place individuals academically within their peer group. This is why grade boundaries are adjusted year by year via norm distribution calculations. These adjustments in grade boundary ensure that the proportion of students receiving each grade remains relatively constant, or so it should be. When done properly this means that GCSE’s give an accurate measure of an individual’s academic standing in society the year they took their exams.

So, when taken against the rises of past years, this blip barely registers and its effects should not be exaggerated to disastrous proportion, were it not the first time in 24 years, no one would even care. The fact that it is the first time is a poor indictment of past exams not the current ones.

So, a couple of days ago I published my book ‘Of Assassins and Kings’ on kindle and I thought I might start a blog, now I’m faced with the question of what to write. Well, the most appropriate subject would seem to be kindle, although that doesn’t give me much to write about since it really was very easy, so easy that I can’t help thinking that the days of new righters looking for representation are somewhat over. For those who’ve never tried to get published, which kind of includes me since I never actually sent the book to any publishing houses or agents, I should probable explain. The answer is that the road to traditional publishing is long, arduous and often unrewarding. It is so long in-fact that it is quite possible for publishing to take longer that the process of writing the book, up to 18 months for your book to hit the shelves, and that’s after getting an agent. It’s no better after publishing as limited print runs will mean that your book is off the shelves after only a couple of years. All this means that most authors never earn out of their advance, assuming they even got an advance.

By contrast, kindle direct publishing requires only a few hours on the computer to up load to amazon, then you wait twelve hours and there it is, your book on amazon, up for sale. To be honest I don’t expect to make any money off publishing, but to be honest I don’t care. I would if I had gone to the great bother of finding an agent and getting published, but I didn’t. I wrote the book for fun and any money I do make is simply a bonus.

My advice to anyone else who has written a book is, publish on amazon you might get lucky and find yourself rich. If not you’ll have lost nothing and had some fun writing. As regards the change I think this will make to publishing it’s quite simple. I don’t think kindle will kill it off; there will always be a place for traditional paper books. But I do think that there will come a time when new authors will simply not bother and amazon will become a proving ground for hopeful authors. Those who are successful in this arena will then find themselves approached by literary agents interested in their work. In essence, agents will turn into something more like head-hunters.

As regards the book, well, it’s on amazon, check it out and judge for yourself, at some point I’ll put the prologue up on this blog for people to read.