"Pushy homos and uppity females getting you down? Why not cloak your hate in faith and say: It's my religion!" At the Labour Humanist we like to promote some of the independent political cartoonists out there. So please do check out Mikhaela Reid. And here's a great example of her work:
What the Daily Mail doesn't tell you about the silver ring (franchise) thing.
All hail the Ministry of Truth!
From Christopher Hitchens and his Q&A for the Times:
"I remember once saying, in despair, to my somewhat turbulent two-year-old son: "I suppose you know that Santa Claus knows what's going on here," and it was like waving a magic wand, and I remember thinking this is what the priests must have worked out a long time ago."
And this quote is pretty good as well:
"There was ex-House Speaker Newt Gingrich at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University challenging the graduates to confront 'the radical secularists' who 'insist that religious belief is inherently divisive and that public debate can only proceed on secular terms.' Excuse me, but how would you have a public debate in religious terms? A Scripture-quoting competition?"
(Carol Towarnicky, Philadelphia Daily News)
Vile Islamic courts in Iran are carrying out judicial murder through the in-human barbarity of stoning people to death for the "crime" of having an "extra marital affair". I have no hesitation in asking people to read this story and take the recommended action.
The media empire strikes back. Following the astroturfed attack on Radio 1 for not being "religious" enough by church leaders Radio 1 Newsbeat editor Rob McKenzie has hit back. Responding to the bizarre attack for not running Easter as a news story Mckenzie says:
"Do we mention Diwali, Ede or Passover - or Christmas Day - just for the sake of it? In my view, no. To be a news story there has got to be something happening. That something needs to be interesting, relevant and significant for the target audience. Clearly a statement from the Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury may be highly relevant and interesting for some audiences - but not for others.
Like it or not, our audience research demonstrates what most of us instinctively feel - that organised Christian religion isn't exactly, well, massive for younger audiences. It currently rates near the very bottom of a list of subject areas under 30s want to hear more about, according to work commissioned by BBC News.
On the day in question there were some very interesting news stories around competing for attention: The 15 sailors and Marines held captive by Iran had been told they could sell their stories to the media, and a storm was breaking over that decision. The Mujahedeen Army had posted a message on the internet claiming responsibility for a roadside bomb that killed four British soldiers in Iraq. Nato forces were claiming success against the Taleban in Afghanistan, we carried a police appeal over the stabbing of a teenager in south London, there was a Grand Prix and Premiership action - and just a couple of minutes an hour or less to cram it all into. For my money, the Easter messages just didn't cut the mustard."
The churches are making themselves a laughing stock for this attack on Radio 1 we can only hope for more to come!
I never "forget" how in so many countries trade unionists are persecuted, but maybe, I should write about it more on this blog. So thanks to Harry at three score years and ten for reminding us of the sad murder of Moaaid Hamid who was the vice president of the General Federation of Iraqi Workers (GFIW).
The Islamic extremists who are currently engaged in an orgy of killing and cruelty in Iraq find it very easy to hate their fellow human beings for all kinds of reasons. One category of human they don't like is trade unionists - salt of the earth, on the side of the little guy - trade unionists.
No matter how wrong the invasion of Iraq was, it gives absolutely no justification for the persecution of trade unionists by the religious nutters currently swaggering around that poor country. It also reminds us of the hostility of many religious activists around the world to people coming together in trade unions.
An organisation which is planning to take over the running of an additional 100 secondary schools in England has been slammed for its "irresponsible" behaviour and "covering up" child abuse by its staff. The controversy covers one of its staff members who was jailed this week for abusing three school boys. When the organisation found out about the child abuse, they did not tell the police and arranged for their employee to leave his position "quietly".
A senior spokesperson for the organisation said that at the time - 1990 - this was the "way things were done" and "I think that we make the mistake of trying to read back what we now know and how we now do things."
If you haven't guessed yet, the organisation involved here is the Church of England and the spokesperson who didn't "know" covering up for child abusers was wrong in 1990 was Reverend Mark Rudall of the diocese of Guildford.
And yes, this would be in the same week when the Archbishop of Canterbury accused politicians of lacking "moral leadership" and arrogantly asserted that we need the religious to know more about morality - implication that us non-religious folk don't know right from wrong whereas bishops and reverends would.(try telling that people who were abused as children only to see the local bishop attempt to cover up the crimes)
Of course, if anything this week's events has demonstrated the opposite, showing how religion can pervert normal morality by putting the interests of the church, over the interests and rights of children. It's not an untypical or isolated case as some experts are estimating payments to victims of sexual abuse by priests in the United States could reach $1bn.
The Church of England's first instinct was to cover up. It has taken secular advances in social care and human rights to drag the reluctant churches at least partially into the modern era.
Now I only just said last week that we don't "do religion" on this blog - except where religion clashes with the cherished idea of secular democracy. I should have added one other category - where believers try and smear the character of us non-believers.
In the Guardian on Saturday was a column by someone called Nicholas Buxton which so infuriated me, I need to sound off a little. If I can crudely paraphrase Buxton, he wrote that there is no such thing as reality, just different social constructions and discourses, and that Christians like to construct life with special meaning whereas secularists and atheists are all in favour of globalised markets and the commodification of life.
It's a load of badly argued tosh, but contained within this text is the subtext that always drives me mad, that somehow Christians are better people because they've got "souls" and the rest of us are lesser members of society. I don't make any assumptions of the personal qualities, good or bad, of another human being purely based on their religion, or lack of. I thought it would be quite obvious that we should judge people on what they do and not on which belief they publicly ascribe to. But if a religious person wants to move way from that common sense and make personalised attacks on all non-believers, then we must retain the right to bite back.
I have always suspected that a number of theists would eventually abandon their centuries old claim to know The Truth after having just about all of it shredded by scientific advances, and instead resort to cultural relativism. You have your truth, I have my truth, and it would be unfair and aggressive to submit someone else's truth to any kind of scrutiny, or heaven forbid, demand evidence and rational argument to back up that truth. And this is exactly where Buxton is coming from.
Of course as soon as you use evidence to evaluate Buxton's arguments, they come crashing down. The non-religious are more likely to vote for left wing and social democratic parties than Christians. Social democrats, believe the markets should be made to work for people and not the other way around. The biggest force pushing global markets, trampling over democratic control, and turning every aspect of social life into a commodity - are the current incumbents of the White House - who just about all happen to be...Christians. Today, Regent University,
founded by the televangelist Pat Robertson to provide "Christian
leadership to change the world," boasts that it has 150 graduates
working in the Bush administration.
Buxton tries to claim that human life was in some way valued more before the decline of Christianity:
"Where once we were souls, we are now consumers"
Well I wouldn't fancy being a peasant in Europe when the church had its way and strongly supported for centuries a system of feudal bondage and slavery. Hardly a profound point to make, but the Buxton article is a gross re-writing of history. Quaequam blog attacks the article on similar grounds:
"...the Church was a political body which was perfectly happy to treat the hoi polloi as so much fodder to work on its land and fight and die in its wars. Trendy lefty though I may be, I’m much happier being a post-Enlightenment ‘consumer’ than a pre-enlightenment ’soul’.
You also only have to look around you to see that there are plenty of Christians who are perfectly happy to treat us as consumers. Brian Souter is hardly the poster child for corporate social responsibility. Thatcher, the vanguard of neoliberalism in the UK, was hardly famous for her atheism: Reagan and his spiritual heir George Bush are famous for their faith."
This article was published in the Guardian on the same day the newspaper lead its front page approvingly with a quote from Gordon Brown and his concern about celebrity culture: "It is a remarkable culture where people appear on television and are famous simply for the act of appearing on television." I don't think it's being too harsh to say that Buxton may have some talents, but writing insightful opinion pieces isn't one of them. It seems his only apparent qualification for getting prime space in a national newsaper is, ahem, that he
appeared on a TV "reality" show called The Monastery.
Buxton previously wrote for the Guardian that a life without religion would
give us no reason to get up in the morning and instead we should just
give up and jump off the edge of a cliff. Hmm, interesting insight into his state of mind!
Update:
Unsurprisingly Buxton has been well and truly trashed in the comments section on the Guardian web site. It was also good to see the philosopher Stephen Law join in the "debate":
"Buxton is here more or less quoting from Rowan William' Dimbleby Lecture in which Williams claims that only a religious tradition makes "possible a real questioning of the immediate agenda of a society, the choices that are defined and managed for you by the market." Buxton would have us believe only the religious ever really question our shallow commercial culture. They alone are the "free thinkers".
As an atheist philosopher who has spent half a lifetime asking such questions as whether there’s a God, whether life has meaning, what makes things right and wrong, whether there may be life after death, and whether there is anything beyond the material, I find it surprising that Buxton and the Archbishop would pretend that it’s only from the perspective of a religious tradition that such questions ever get asked.
The great religious traditions do not have a monopoly on addressing the most fundamental and challenging issues. They share that honour with the secular, philosophical tradition (which is of course, also older than theirs).
And one advantage of a more philosophical approach to such questions (which certainly doesn’t rule out religious answers, of course) is that it doesn’t prejudge the issue. Rather than approaching such questions in a genuinely critical, open-minded way, religious enquirers have often already made up their minds: they’ve already decided that only a religious answer will do. In the hands of the faithful, questions like “What is the meaning of life?” may be asked, not in the spirit of sincere, open-minded enquiry, but merely as the opening gambit in an attempt to recruit more true believers.
Let's have more philosophy, not more religion."
As regular readers might know this blog doesn't "do religion"...no honestly, it really doesn't! This blog does do the interaction, or perhaps clash is often the better word, between politics and religion, between the secular idea of an equal place for all beliefs in society and those who want to give religious belief special privileges. But we don't do religion as in looking at, and taking apart, the gaps and holes in the claims to truth from the main religions. I have personally, like millions and millions of others, left all that behind, it isn't required to make sense of the world in which we live, it's going back to old ground so to speak.
Now, if you do like that kind of thing, recently added to the links section is Stephen Law's blog. Stephen is the editor of the Royal Institute of Philosophy
journal THINK.He has published several books and is currently senior
lecturer in philosophy at Heythrop College, University of London. And Stephen does do religion! From moral relativism to the "problem of evil" Stephen dissects the many weaknesses in religions' assertions. Well worth a read.
Also recommended if you want to see some atheist jousting with mostly Christian theology check the blog aggregator atheistblogs.
Christopher Hitchens was in his usual ebullient form this week at the Times/Intelligence2 debate "are we better off without religion?" Speaking for the motion were the heavy artillery of Richard Dawkins, A.C. Grayling and Hitchens. Speaking against and dodging the heavy shelling was Rabbi Julia Neuberger, Roger Scruton and Nigel Spivey. The debate is engaging stuff and mp3 or podcast files of the speeches can be found here.
Christopher Hitchens began by recalling a recent exchange in Colorado Springs with an evangelical broadcaster who insisted he answer the following question, and insisted he answered with a yes or a no:
You are to imagine yourself in a strange city, at night, without friends, would feel yourself to be safer or less safe if you saw a dozen men coming towards you in the dark, if you were to know they had recently come from a prayer meeting?
Hitchens replied that through his work he had been in that situation several times...in…Belfast…Bombay…Beirut…Belgrade…Baghdad and other places.
You can see where this is going already can’t you!
Hitchens said in Belfast, everything socially and economically has been retarded for at least half a century by sectarian warfare, people killing their neighbours on the basis of what type of Christian they were. That one of the few things the different churches agreed on is that children must be separated into different schools and not be educated alongside children of other beliefs. In Baghdad – the parties of god have the Iraqi people "in their jaws" killing off any process of transition to a democracy. Promoting a religious duty to blow up the mosques of other types of believer. In Beirut – the constitution defines citizens by faith...the president must always be a Christian, the speaker of the parliament a Shia, the vice president must always be a Sunni etc etc and just look at the consequences. In Belgrade there was the corrosive influence of faith in what happened in Bosnia. He talked of Bombay now Mumbai– a city nearly ruined by the sectarian partition of India
Hitchens was careful to say religion is not the sole cause of all these problems, but he posed a challenge: Who is not to say that the preaching of religion has not in all these cases gravely, deepened, poisoned and prolonged all these threats to civilisation?
Don't think that was the answer the evangelical broadcaster was expecting!
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