Category Archives: Religion

What a Pickle!

Eric Pickles has now flung his not inconsiderable weight into the dispute over whether local councils can hold prayers as part of their business. He’s going to rush through a commencement order for powers contained in the Localism Act 2011 which would give councils a “general power of competence”.

Now, while most of us would be only too delighted to see our local councils exercise some competence, there is some serious doubt whether the new powers would solve the “problem”. It all arises because of a recent ruling in the High Court that Bideford Town Council had acted unlawfully by allowing prayers to be said during meetings. I find it astonishing that, in the 21st century, we are even having this debate.

The business of a local council, or any body that exercises executive power, outside of the church itself, should not contain an act of corporate worship. I am a civil servant and if I suggested starting a meeting with christian prayers I would firstly be howled down and then, probably, subjected to disciplinary action. I also find offensive in all this the suggestion that you can only be a good councillor if you’re a christian.

We are a nation of many faiths and of none. The churches claim that 6 million attend regularly. That’s probably an over-estimate, but even if it isn’t it’s still less than ten per cent of the population and, therefore, no basis on which to incorporate religious worship into the public functions of organisations that exist to serve everyone.

Religious worship has its place, but that isn’t in the council chamber or, come to that, the chambers of the Houses of Parliament.

Fred vs The Hackers

I make no apology for returning to an old soap box – the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) – since news came this week that several of WBC’s egregious websites had been hacked and taken offline by the anonymous group LulzFinancial.

I must admit to a reasonable degree of schadenfreude when I heard that WBC had been hit in this way – again! I seem to recall that some years ago someone hijacked godhatesfags and pointed it at godhatesfigs – a statement for which there is no small biblical justification!

If you read the bible literally (and particularly the old testament) you’ll find shed loads of things that god hates – adultery and sex outside marriage, for instance, and Shirley Phelps-Roper (Fred’s vicar in the real world) ought to know a thing or two about that. But you don’t see people waving vile placards at funerals to protest about eating meat on a Friday or wearing polyester. Continue reading Fred vs The Hackers

Are you still here?

Wasn’t the world supposed to end yesterday?

After his much publicised prediction that the last judgement was going to happen on 21 May (see here), Harold Camping has been somewhat more quietly saying that he got his numbers wrong and that the real date was 21 October.

To be fair Harold did say this time that that the end will come “very, very quietly”. Apparently God’s judgement and salvation were completed on May 21, Mr Camping said in a message explaining the mix-up in his biblical math. He said that Christ put the ‘unsaved’ into judgement on that date, but that it will not be physically seen until yesterday. He wrote on his website “Thus we can be sure that the whole world, with the exception of those who are presently saved (the elect), are under the judgement of God, and will be annihilated together with the whole physical world on October 21.”

Still waiting and still not holding my breath! But now it’s Saturday the 22nd, the sun is shining, there are birds squabbling in the kids’ playground at the end of the road and we still owe the bloody mortgage!

A bit of an anti-climax

It’s nearly nine o’clock on May 21st and the Rapture is three hours overdue. The trees at the back of the house take on that glorious green-gold colour as the sun sets slowly. I confidently predict that it will rise tomorrow over those same trees.

Meanwhile, somewhere in California, an eighty-nine year old bible basher is spending the rest of the day wiping copious amounts of egg off his face. Harold Camping, for it is he, must be feeling pretty damned stupid if he actually believed all that tub-thumping about worldwide earthquakes. (Although there remains the distinct possibility that it was just so much posturing humbug to secure an insecure man his few brief moments of world fame!) Continue reading A bit of an anti-climax

It’s Easter …

… so let’s have some more catholic-bashing!

The BBC reports that the leader of the Catholic Church in Scotland, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, will use his Easter message to attack “aggressive secularism” – whatever that may be!

It is a vain hope that the princes of the Catholic church will ever understand that they don’t rule here any more, that their day is waning and that they are increasingly irrelevant.

In a reference to equality legislation preventing discrimination against homosexual people, Cardinal O’Brien will denounce what he claims is the way Christians have been prevented from acting in accordance with their beliefs because they refuse to endorse such lifestyles”.

Cardinal O’Brien seems to argue that christians should somehow be exempt from the law because of their beliefs. Why? What makes their convictions any more valid than the next person’s?

The law is NOT there to govern what a person believes – it is there to control a person’s behaviour.

I am a civil servant.  My colleagues and I are there to administer law and we are, despite what some of the red tops might say, human. We carry with us the same preferences and prejudices as anyone else, although I’m not about to start airing all of mine in public. But we are required to suspend them and act in accordance with the Acts. There have been many times over the years when I have  been required to do things that I did not believe were morally right, but I did them because that’s what the law told me to do. If I were to start putting catholics at a disadvantage because I cannot “endorse such lifstyles” no doubt the good cardinal would (rightly, for once) be denouncing me from the pulpit. And if ever the struggle between the law and my sense of what is right and fair gets too great I will quit and go and sell paint in B&Q.

I will state this again for the record. I don’t care what Catholics, or the adherents of any other religion, believe any more than I care what the wedding dress will be like, the latest “plot” in Eastenders, the sodding Olympics or any other of the myriad ephemera with which we are daily deluged. The difference is that those who take the last three on that list seriously aren’t arguing for some sort of special status.

Neither, as an atheist, do I.

Twisted in Topeka

Louis Theroux’s revisit to Westboro Baptist Church (last night on BBC2) was revealing and disturbing, but not for what was said.

True, there was the usual parade of bigotry and downright lies; the selected bible quotes taken out of context and blasted fortissimo at anyone within ear shot; the repugnant posters; the crapulent and deeply unfunny parodies of songs; in fact, the usual tide of twisted filth you expect from the Fred Phelps Follies.

There were moments of light, as Theroux took pains to show the counter-demonstrations that now regularly take place whenever the Phelps-Jugend take to the streets. Many towns use such gatherings to raise money for research into HIV. There was a moment of revelation when it became clear that the patriarch was going to run away rather than face the man on camera.

There was even, occasionally, the hysterically funny – like Steve Drain comparing Theroux to Pontius Pilate. (I’d suggest, at this point, that Drain the Brain should go back and read the gospels. Pilate wasn’t anywhere near as bad as he was later painted!)

No. What was really on show last night were the cracks in the façade Continue reading Twisted in Topeka

Wrong, Wrong, WRONG!

It’s not uncommon for politicians and political animals to get things wrong. We criticise them for it all the time.

Staffan de Mistura, however, has now plumbed the depths of an altogether quite superlative wrongness. De Mistaker has blamed the killing of 14 people in violent demonstrations in Afghanistan on Friday on an American pastor who burnt a copy of the koran.

Granted that the actions of Wayne Sapp and Terry Jones were offensive to muslims. Burning a copy of a religious book is an intolerant and highly bigoted act. But – it was just a book. And if a faith is so weak that it cannot withstand such a mild assault then I venture to suggest that it is not worth having. Unfortunately, the modern religious zealot has little or no sense of proportion.

I find some of the proponents of both christianity and islam highly offensive. What would you expect me to say of people who openly call me an abomination and, in the case of the latter, think I should be killed merely because I am what I am. The difference is that you don’t see crowds of angry queens and lesbians rampaging through the streets killing people because someone dared to disagree with them.

De Mistaker says “I don’t think we should be blaming any Afghan, we should be blaming the person who produced the news – the one who burned the Koran.”

No. NO. NO!!!

You put the blame for those deaths on the bastards that did it – and you can STOP making excuses for religious nutjobs who value nothing but their own set of bigotries.

A Duty to Remember

First they came for the communists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Pastor Martin Niemoller

 

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day.

More than 65 years after the end of World War II some may ask why we should bother reminding ourselves of man’s inhumanity to man.

Well, quite apart from the fact that the Holocaust was the worst example of mass murder in modern recorded history, there is the very reasonable observation that those who ignore or forget their history are doomed to repeat it. A lesson mankind has yet to learn.

never in my name …

Holocaust Memorial Day is about remembering the victims and those whose lives have been changed beyond recognition by the Holocaust, Nazi persecution and subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and the ongoing atrocities today in Darfur.

Holocaust Memorial Day provides us with an opportunity to honour the survivors, but it’s also a chance to look to our own lives and communities today.

Genocide doesn’t happen overnight, it’s a gradual process which begins when the differences between us are not celebrated but used as a reason to exclude or marginalise. By learning from the lessons of the past, we can create a safer, better future.

Tonight, at home in peace and safety, light a candle to say never again and never in my name.

Joe and his former boss

It seems the pope and his friends are becoming a little too fond of the Nazi analogies.

Back in April this year Fr Raniero Cantalamessa, who is the pope’s preacher, likened what the church was going through as a result of the child sex abuse scandal to the persecution of the Jews under Hitler. Yesterday the old man drew parallels between the Nazi tyranny and “atheist extremism”, whatever that might be.

The owner of the world’s most famous smoking handbag should very well understand Nazi ideology having been a Hitler Jugend himself. (The Vatican now tries desperately to underplay this, saying that he was only doing what everyone his age was required to do.)

At the age of five Ratzinger is reported to have said Continue reading Joe and his former boss

Papa has landed

Today is a special day in my family. It would have been my father’s 85th birthday. Today is also the day in which we “welcome” another octogenarian to the United Kingdom. Both men preached the gospels – one I admired immensely (and still do) the other I abhor, and I offer no prize for guessing which one is which.

There has been enormous controversy concerning the pope’s visit, and quite rightly so. Let me get one thing straight. I have no objection to the pope coming to this country as head of the catholic church and spiritual leader of his flock. I do have strong objections to him coming here on a full blown state visit, partly at my expense.

First things first – the Vatican City State is not really a nation state Continue reading Papa has landed