Losing my place in heaven?

A local church's "wayside pulpit" notice board has the following message:

"What if... you doubt God exists? Don't let doubt lose your place in heaven"

As a Christian I find this message profoundly offensive on several levels.  First, it is a message of fear.  To me it is the ultimate backfiring of Protestant religion.  One aspect of the Protestant Reformation was that it sought to remove a climate of fear based on having to behave in a certain way.  By recognizing that we are sinners, asking God's forgiveness in the sincere belief that Christ died to take the punishment upon himself, we can be redeemed.  In shorthand, "all you have to do is believe, and everything will follow from that".  There is no condemnation for those who believe.  And perhaps part of the Protestant appeal to reason is that if belief gets you to heaven, then lack of it will lose you your place in heaven.  But as a message to passers by?  Surely "doubt and you'll go to hell" is no more enlightened than "sin and you'll go to hell".

The second thing wrong with the message is that confusion about what doubt is.  It is being taken as the opposite of belief.  But doubt is a necessary part of belief!  Without doubt, you would have certainty, which is not the same as belief.  Certainty seems to me to be a tremendously damaging force in religion.  Suicide bombers are driven by certainty about their place in heaven.  But the rest of us, however faithful we may be, do not know.  Even this church's own website says "The truthful answer is that we cannot know for certain [that there is a God]"

The third problem for me is the level of certainty that this poster has not only in the existence of God but also in the existence of heaven, with "places" that could be denied to us like seats in a concert hall (would my place be given to someone else, I wonder?)  We really don't know what heaven is.  My understanding comes from Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, where he gives several pictures of the kingdom of heaven, and to me those pictures are so earth-based that there is no need for pie in the sky.  So ironically I end up having nothing to fear from the fearsome message of this church banner.  But I still find it offensive.  I say "keep those doubts flowing".

A Fair Day's Pay

The concept of a fair day's pay based on annual salary should not be difficult, should it?  Of course not!  But what should it be?  Is it 1/365 of annual salary, because there are 365 days in a year?  Or should it be 1/260, which counts only "working days" (Mondays to Fridays) in the calculation?  Or 1/252, because there are also 8 bank holidays?  Or, for a company that offers 25 days' annual leave, should it be 1/227?

Most of the time it doesn't matter.  We work a certain number of days per year and our pay is usually spread over the year in 52 or 12 equal portions.  But it does start to matter when the company starts buying or selling holiday as part of a flexible benefits package, and it also matters for part-time staff.  How much is a day's work worth?

I'm going to ignore any consideration of how much it might cost or benefit the company to offer flexible benefits.  If there needs to be an administration charge, that's fine, but that should be made clear.  What I am concerned about is the raw price that should be attached to a day's work, which should be the basic price that should be charged for buying or selling days of holiday (buying a day's holiday is the same as selling a day's work, and vice versa).  I'm also going to ignore things like pension contributions and tax - I'm just considering the basic salary.

My argument goes against UK employment practice.  But I am right and UK employment practice is wrong!  UK employment practice says that a day's pay is the annual salary divided by 260, which is the number of weekdays in a typical year (actually it's more likely to be 261 and can sometimes be 262, but we can put that to one side for now).  My argument is that a day's pay should be the annual salary divided by the number of days the employee actually works for that salary.  How many days is that?  From 260 weekdays, we subtract 8 bank holidays (royal weddings excepted!) which brings us down to 252 days.  And if the employee has 25 days' paid holiday, the total number of actual working days comes down to 227.

The UK norm is usually justified by saying that because bank holidays and annual leave are both "paid" then those days should count in the calculations.  That is fine when an employee works for the full 227 days.  But suppose an employee would like to buy some more holiday from the company (or take unpaid leave - it's the same thing).  With the UK norm, she would pay 1/260 salary per day, which seems OK until you look at what happens when she buys more and more days.  Suppose the company were very flexible and allowed her to buy enough holiday to take the whole year off.  To do that, she would need to buy 227 days, which would cost 227/260 of her salary.  She would be left with 33/260, or 12.7%, of her salary for doing no work at all!  Why does this happen?  It's because as her number of actual working days decreases, she continues to be entitled to 25 days' (paid) holiday and 8 (paid) bank holidays.  What should happen is that as she works fewer days, her paid holiday entitlement should also go down.  This is what we normally do with part-time staff.  In a company where full-timers get 25 days' holiday, someone who works 3 days a week will normally be given 3/5 x 25 = 15 days, and there will normally be some kind of arrangement to deal with bank holidays as well.  A full-timer buying holiday should be treated in exactly the same way as a part-timer.  If she is not, then the system is unfair to part-timers.

With my approach, a day's holiday should be valued at 1/227 salary.  Our mythical year-long holidaymaker would then pay 227/227, or all of her salary for the privilege, which is as it should be.  And for more realistic amounts of holiday, the employee will be treated exactly the same as a part-timer working the same number of days.

It might be argued that using 1/227 contradicts the principle of paid holiday, since this holiday is not part of the 227 days.  But in fact it's the other way round.  1/227 salary for each working day includes the money paid for the correct proportion of annual holiday, so as the employee buys holiday, part of what she pays goes to buy back the annual holiday she should be losing as her working year gets shorter.

If the employee sells holiday, the same rate of 1/227 should also be used, because by working for more days the employee is effectively earning more paid holiday.  The difference between 1/227 and 1/260 is 12.7% (the same as the proportion of holidays to weekdays) which is quite a serious amount.  Giving an employee 1/260 for extra days of work is equivalent to paying time minus 12.7% for overtime - not a good deal!

Costing a day’s work at 1/260 annual salary is unfair, especially to part-time staff

Some companies allow employees to buy or sell annual holiday at a rate of 1/260 of annual salary per day. This rate is the standard payroll rate in the UK for such calculations. But it is unfair, especially to part-time employees.

Here is an example to explain why. To make the example clear, it is necessary to suppose that the maximum amount of holiday that can be purchased is quite high. But this doesn’t alter the principle, and the calculations could easily be redone with whatever limits a particular company has put in place.

Suppose Adam works full-time on a salary of £50,000. He has 25 days’ holiday a year and there are 8 bank holidays. There are 260 working days in a year, so Adam actually works 260-25-8 = 227 days in the year.

Eve has an identical salary to begin with but then negotiates a modest part-time arrangement of 9-day fortnights, so 90% of full time. The company agrees to pay 90% of her full-time salary, which is £45,000. As is usually done with part-timers, her annual holiday entitlement is also reduced to 90% of the previous level, so she has 22.5 days’ holiday. Suppose for now that Eve’s reduction in working time is small enough for bank holidays to be ignored in the negotiations: she will still get all 8 bank holidays as before. Eve’s part time arrangement therefore means that she will be working (260 x 0.9) – 22.5 – 8 = 203.5 days. This is slightly less (by 0.8 days) than 90% of Adam’s 227 days because we have decided to ignore the bank holidays.

Now suppose Adam and Eve have a relationship and Adam decides that he would like to buy extra holiday to be with Eve on all her days off. As I said, we are allowing him to buy quite a lot of holiday. He needs to buy 227 – 203.5 = 23.5 days. The typical arrangement would allow him to buy this holiday at 1/260 of his salary per day. So he has to pay £50,000 x 23.5 / 260 = £4,519 to get this holiday. So working exactly the same number of days as Eve, he will end up with a salary of £45,481 compared with Eve’s £45,000.  Unfair!  Actually, Eve's deal is fair, it's Adam's that is unfair by comparison.

Why does this happen? It is because the rate of 1/260 is too cheap! We consider our annual holiday to be paid holiday. In other words, our salary is spread over the year including the time we take off as holiday. Paid holiday is not a free gift from the company to all employees – we effectively earn it by working. A half-timer does not get 25 days a year but 12.5 days, or 25 half-days. So when we reduce an employee’s hours in a part-time arrangement, we reduce their working hours, their holiday and their salary pro rata.

By contrast, allowing Adam to buy his holiday at 1/260 of salary per day is effectively allowing him to keep his full 25 days’ original holiday entitlement even when he starts to reduce his working time.

How do we make it fair? We charge for bought holiday according to the number of days Adam actually works for his full-time salary. He works 227 days, so we should perhaps charge him 1/227 of his salary. Then, when he buys his Eve-leave of 23.5 days, he pays £50,000 x 23.5 / 227 = £5,176. This is a bit more than Eve has “paid” because of the bank holidays. So a compromise might be to suppose that bank holidays are a free gift; this works reasonably well even for “stronger” part-timers because some of the bank holidays will probably fall on the part-timer’s days off. So with this compromise we include the 8 bank holidays but not the 25 days’ annual holiday in Adam’s holiday purchase rate. So he should buy holiday at 1/235 of his salary. At that rate, his Eve-leave of 23.5 days will cost him £50,000 x 23.5 / 235 = £5,000, and he ends up exactly the same as Eve.

The nature of bank holidays does complicate matters slightly, but the headline result is that the number of working days used to calculate the daily rate should be reduced by the employee’s annual holiday entitlement. For companies that offer 25 days’ annual holiday, a much fairer rate would therefore be 1/235 rather than 1/260. This is an increase of 10.6%. Not only is it fairer to part-timers by comparison, it means the company will receive more for purchased holiday.

The other side to all this is that 1/260 is an unfairly low rate when employees wish to sell holiday. If Cain earns £50,000, he is receiving £50,000 / 235 = £212.77 on average for every day he goes into work (we are assuming now that bank holidays are full working days). But if he wants to sell holiday, every extra day he comes into work he will only earn £50,000 / 260 = £192.31. Quite a big difference! One way of thinking of this is that if Cain works for more days, by rights he should be given back a little bit of paid holiday for every extra day he works. The exact figure should be 25 / 260 = 0.096. This means that if he works an extra 10 days he should be given approximately one day’s holiday, so in fact he need only work 9 days. So if we really must keep the 1/260 rule, we would need to start giving employees extra annual holiday pro rata to the number of extra days worked.

So, in summary, allowing an employee to buy holiday at 1/260 is unfair on both the company and on part-timers, and giving an employee 1/260 for holiday he sells is unfair on the employee. A fairer figure would be 1/235 or, in general 1 / (260 – usual annual holiday entitlement)

If there is an absolute need to stick to 1/260, then employees purchasing holiday should lose some of their original annual holiday pro rata, and employees selling holiday should receive additional annual holiday pro rata. But that is very messy and difficult to understand; the equivalent measure of using 1/235 is surely the better option.

Mind the gap – Stand clear of the Dawkins!

A short summary of a talk given at St Mary Magdalen, Sheet, earlier this autumn. This article was published in the December issue of the "Pompey Chimes", the newspaper of the Anglican Diocese of Portsmouth in the UK.

What happens when science and faith encounter each other? Is there going to be conflict, are they complementary, or can they coexist happily?

Conflict seems to be the order of the day, especially in attitudes to the formation of the universe and the development of life on earth. On one side there are the atheists, famously represented by Richard Dawkins, who cannot imagine a place for God in the world they observe. Dawkins writes eloquently about the beautiful, elegant theory of evolution and conveys his sense of wonder in books such as “The Ancestor’s Tale”. It’s a pity that he also chooses to rant against a very particular view of religion, tarring us all with the same brush.

On the other side there are a surprising number of people, especially in the USA, who stick to a very strict interpretation of the Genesis creation stories. They have hijacked the term “creationist” to mean something much more than a belief in God the Creator; they are unable to accept the ideas of a Big Bang billions of years ago, or of an evolutionary process by which we share common ancestors with every living thing. Some might try to reconcile belief in a six-day creation with science by imagining that God created everything with a built-in history. To the scientific mind, that idea is at best a bit silly and useless for understanding anything, and at worst speaks of a God who is a massive fraudster. So most creationists end up rejecting the huge weight of scientific evidence for evolution and for a very old universe, and some even believe that there is some kind of anti-God conspiracy in the scientific community. Such ideas unfortunately play right into the hands of Dawkins and his friends. They also show a profound disrespect for the richness of Holy Scripture.

A less antagonistic approach to the debate is to say that the two worlds are complementary. This is a common and attractive idea: let science speak about what we observe in the physical world, and let faith speak about what is spiritual and can’t be explained. There is a big flaw in this approach, though: as science helps us understand more about unseen things, from electricity and magnetism to the way our minds work, the space left for faith in God diminishes. This is the “God of the gaps” principle which Dawkins (along with many Christian writers) ably and rightly demolishes. Even if we accept that the spiritual world is infinite and poses questions that science might never answer, there is something very unsatisfactory about a belief system that retreats from scientific understanding.

One of the reasons for trying to put science and faith into separate compartments stems from a misunderstanding of scientific laws and theories. We talk about a scientific law as if it is something that is “obeyed” whereas it is only really a pattern seen in what is observed. And a theory (such as evolution) is seen as something that is either true or false, whereas it’s really a model that fits the patterns in the evidence we have observed and which can be used to make predictions. If a theory is found wanting, we change it but the old theory hasn’t really become “untrue” – just less accurate or useful. Over the last hundred years or so the ideas of scientific certainty and “truth” have anyway been blown apart by quantum physics with its strong emphasis on probability and uncertainty, and the old Western dividing line between matter and spirit has become more blurred.

Happily, there is a third way, in which science and faith come together. It is to recognize the “immanence” of God in the natural world – God living and breathing through the complexity and beauty of the world that scientists strive to make sense of. It is also to encourage scientists to understand the importance of religious faith in the human journey, and perhaps even more importantly to encourage Christians not to be afraid of scientific theories and endeavours. After all, it would be absurd to imagine that our great God somehow needs protecting from the Big Bang or from the theory of evolution! In the same way as most Christians can accept (even if we don’t understand) a God who can enter into human suffering, we can surely also accept a God who is tightly woven right through every other aspect of his world.

Inappropriate metaphors

Here are the first two entries in my new collection of inappropriate metaphors.

When Galloway Forest Park was announced about a year ago as Britain's first official "Dark Sky Park" because it is so free from light pollution, Environment Minister Roseanna Cunningham said the worldwide interest in the Dark Skies initiative would put the forest park "firmly in the spotlight".

Last week, a House of Lords committee was discussing the possibility of taking action against Google who had "inadvertently" recorded lots of personal data such as Wi-Fi passwords while driving around to add Street View images to Google Maps. Someone said that it was difficult to know what could be done as there was no clear legal precedent; in his words, "we are in uncharted territory"!

British English quirks

I've noticed two changes that have occurred in spoken British English over the past twenty years or so. My guess is that they have both come from over the Atlantic, but what interests me is that they seem to go in different directions.

The first is that people now say at the coffee kiosk "Can I get a cappuccino?" whereas we always used to say something like "Could I have a cappuccino?" (Actually, it would have been "could I have a coffee?" but you know what I mean). To my ears, "can I get...?" sounds a little strange - I would feel like answering ("you can if you like, but I can sell you one if you prefer").

The second change is that my kids would say ("I don't have a dog") whereas I would say ("I haven't got a dog") See what I mean? In one case we have gone from "have" to "get" while in the other we have gone from "get" to "have". Curious, huh?

The Last Supper

I'm really fascinated by the study on the meal sizes in paintings of the Last Supper (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8580146.stm) They used head size as a yardstick. This made me think about the distance between people's eyes, fairly standard at about 6.5 cm, and I wondered if anyone had done a study comparing the distance between Judas's eyes and those of the other disciples?