Recent news from around the UK
It’s been a busy couple of days in the UK with regards to religious stupidity (as opposed to boring everyday stupidity, but there’s plenty of that too), and today is the first chance I’ve had to mention any of it. Time is short, so I’ll simply leave you with the articles concerned, and withhold commentary.
First of all, yesterday’s The Guardian had a feature in it’s G2 insert about Britain’s creationist community, and how batshit insane/ignorant they are. Thankfully they’re nowhere near as numerous nor well funded as their transatlantic (or antipodean, for that matter) compeers, although they do appear to have just as much (or, perhaps I should say, little) perspicacity.
Later on, I read in The Telegraph that the hate-filled gay-obsessed funeral-chaser christian homophobic fundie wingnuts from the Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas were planning to demonstrate at a student performance of an anti-homophobia play, The Laramie Project, in Basingstoke. These morons, who describe the queen as a “whore” (which I suppose could be considered technically accurate if you accept that the old biddy has been paid from the public coffers to have produced a number of sprogs destined to to sit on a shiny chair and wear an expensive hat), haven’t expressed whether they’re coming over to the UK themselves or if they have local sympathisers (Stephen “Birdshit” Green, perhaps?) to do it on their behalf.
The Telegraph: Westboro Baptist Church announces first anti-homosexuality picket in Britain
Deputy gobshite in chief (after the insane old guy who I’m convinced was the Tall Man in the Phantasm films) and matriarchal clown-car of the litigious arseholes, Shirley Phelps-Roper, was also in correspondence with The Telegraph, and the CAPS FILLED bible bashing wingnuttery is of the calibre that only these eejits can come out with. It’s tremendously amusing.
The Telegraph & Phelps-Roper: Westboro Baptist Church justifies UK picket
And, today, news from the Home Office broke that the law lords had determined that hate-filled murder-inspiring muslim fundie dipshit Abu Qatada was to be extradited from the UK to face terrorist charges in Jordan, and that cretinous and credulous HomSec Jacqui “Two Flats” Smith was creaming her knickers over the news, obviously still on a high from banning Dutch MP Geert Wilders from entering the UK because a bunch of ass-backwards muslims might get upset and have a violent tantrum if some other people get to see his Fitna film.
BBC News: Law Lords back Qatada deportation
Phew! After all that, I think I need a nice hot cup of tea and a sit down.
The Guardian: If… – ‘My chin is lookin’ kinda long’
Steve Bell’s If… cartoon strip in The Guardian today had me chuckling into my hot caffeinated beverage:
Embiggen this cartoon on The Guardian’s site.
Number 10 responds to ‘no sharia’ petition
The UK government has responded to a petition about sharia being incorporated into UK law. The original petition read:
We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to stop Islamic Sharia Law being used in Great Britain.
The most senior judge in England and Wales has said that aspects of Islamic sharia law could be used in the UK, provided they don’t conflict with existing laws. I say that Islamic sharia law should not be used in the United Kingdom and the Prime Minister should do everything within his power to stop it being introduced.
and the government has responded:
Shari’a law is the code of personal religious law governing the conduct of Muslims. It can extend into all aspects of people’s lives – personal, religious, family, civil and criminal.
Shari’a law is not part of the law of England and Wales. The Government does not intend to change this position in relation to the whole or part of the United Kingdom. However, provided an activity prescribed by Shari’a law does not contravene the law of England and Wales, there is nothing to prohibit it. Muslims can, for example, wear traditional dress and follow dietary rules. They are completely free to worship in the way that they want.
There can never be reliance on the fact that an act is permitted under Shari’a law as a justification for committing what is, under the law of England and Wales, a criminal act. Nor, for example, could someone expect a civil court, in reaching a decision on a contractual case under English or Scottish law, to apply the principles of Shari’a law.
Criminal matters, both small and serious, will always be heard in a Crown or Magistrate’s Court in England and Wales, and in Sheriff’s Courts in Scotland. The decisions made in an alternative court will not be recognised.
I’m not sure if this counts as a successful petition or not. The government seems to imply that, while decisions by self-imposed sharia “courts” are not legally binding, they won’t step in unless there is a criminal act under consideration.
For those of us that don’t subscribe to the personal opinions of self-recognised religious decision makers as legitimate makers of rules for living, this is a win in that islamic religious opinion will not be incorporated into the law and forced upon the rest of us. At least not in England and Wales, I don’t know if the same can be said about Scotland or Northern Ireland.
However, the issue remains that some muslims (what I might consider the more ‘enlightened’ subscribers of islam) may find decisions that they make for themselves being curtailed, whether they agree with the idea of sharia or not, especially if that involves pressure from family, friends or other muslims, especially those with influence within islamic ‘communities’, like imams.
This is most certainly not on in a modern (relatively enlightened) society like the UK.
One’s own life choices should be just that, muslim or not, and no self-appointed ‘authority’ (religious or otherwise) should be allowed to force one to do as they prescribe, or not do what they proscribe if they so choose.
I think I’m going to have to file this one under ‘partial success’.
The People vs Scientology
The UK Government today has responded to two scientology related petitions on the number10.gov.uk web site.
The first petition asked the government to stop the “church” of scientology calling itself such (“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to rename The ‘Church’ of Scientology under section 32 of the Companies Act”) received the following response from the government:
Legislation deems some words to be “sensitive†in the context of company names. A company wishing to use such a word in its name must satisfy certain conditions. The word “church†is not deemed to be a sensitive word and its use in a company name is therefore not subject to any particular controls. Indeed, it is used in many company names which appear on the Register.
Section 32(1) of the Act states that a direction may be issued where, in the Secretary of State’s opinion, a company’s registered name gives so misleading an indication of the nature of its activities as to be likely to cause harm to the public. It is not the company’s activities themselves that are under scrutiny. The name needs to: (i) give an indication of the company’s activities; and (ii) that indication must be so misleading as to cause harm to the public. A company’s registered name means the company’s name as a whole, not one word considered in isolation. It is the name “Church of Scientology (England and Wales)†that is under consideration, not just the word “Churchâ€. .
As the Company is called the “Church of Scientology (England and Wales)†and its main activity is the promotion of Scientology there does not seem to be any attempt to mislead. A person dealing with the Company might not have a comprehensive understanding of what Scientology is, but he or she should be aware that the company’s “trade†is Scientology, therefore there is no basis for the Secretary of State to issue a direction.
So, no win there.
The second petition, to stop the scientology-based Narcanon drug “treatment” programme from inveigling its way into UK prisons and schools (“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to ban the usage of Narconon in any publicly funded orgianisation”) had the following response from the government:
The Government is clear that the commissioning of drug treatment services such as Narconon, is the responsibility of local drug partnerships. Such partnerships are best placed to know the needs and priorities of their clients and how well particular drug treatment services can meet these needs and priorities. We have produced a number of pieces of evidence based guidance to support commissioners and providers in ensuring the drug treatment services that they commission and deliver are of a high quality. This guidance is available on the Department of Health website.
Narconon courses are not run in prisons, but they are delivered via correspondence and there is no legal basis on which to deny prisoners access to Narconon letters. The National Offender Management Service does, however, encourage staff to refer misusing offenders that receive correspondence from Narconon into accredited interventions.
In schools, teachers should be the main providers of drug education and maintain responsibility for the overall drug education programme. External contributors can be used where they add to the drug education programme a dimension that teachers alone cannot deliver. It is for schools and local authorities, however, to decide whether to use the services of an external contributor to assist with their drug education programme, and if so who this should be. The Government’s guidance on drugs, Drugs:Guidance for Schools (DfES 2004) http://www.teachernet.gov,uk/wholeschool/behaviour/drugs/ encourages schools to liaise with their local authority and local Healthy Schools Programmes on the range of individuals and agencies who can support drug education programmes.
This reads like a partial success to me.
As Tony Curtis might have said, you can’t win ‘em all.
What an anglican split means for secularism in the UK
It’s struck me that, as a secularist, I should be concerned with the current crisis within the anglican church, even though it seems at first glance to be simply a tiff between members of the same club who disagree about the rules as set down by a long absent founder. Which, frankly, it is.
My main reasoning here is that, as a bloc, these types of christians would be more effective as a unified force when demanding specific additional entitlement of the state than as two or more sub-cults. As it stands, anglicans, with their especial relationship to the machinery of state in the UK, currently enjoy more particular privileges when compared to any other cultural sub-group.
This isn’t surprising when the UK is actually a de jure anglican theocracy even if it is, in more practical terms, a secular democracy.
Should the anglicans split into, say, two factions — one of a liberal persuasion and one of a more fundamentalist and bigoted creed — that would to my mind significantly weaken the tenacious hold that they have over the established government than they enjoy at present while together. This in turn would also weaken their ‘right’ to demand the maintenance of, or additions to, the privileges they already hold, and would very likely lead to some or all of those privileges being eventually removed, just as the rest of us mere mortals are constrained.
However, the anglicans seem hell-bent on trying to keep themselves as a single entity, to the extent of having signed up the evangelical faction as a ‘church within a church’.
What this means is that they will be able to maintain the incommensurate grip on the state that they already possess and, as they do at present, be further able to express their shared prejudices in the public sphere with more authority than they deserve, while only having to squabble over, as they have done for centuries (and I’d wager for centuries hence), the internal rules of their cult which otherwise doesn’t affect John Q Public.
I support a split in the anglican church, because I’d rather see two churches, a smaller one of a liberal attitude, and another smaller one of bigotry and intolerance, rather than one large bigotry-tolerating church with a state-provided leg-up to power that allows them to make life difficult for the rest of us, especially those of us that don’t subscribe to the baseless and most fundamental claims of their dogma and, it seems, one of the few things they otherwise agree on: the magic man of yore.
Revoke UK blasphemy laws (petition)
UK citizens: if you haven’t done so, why not take a couple of moments out of your day to sign the Number 10 petition to get rid of the UK’s blasphemy laws (deadline to sign up by: 8 March 2008).
Further reading: Appendix 3 of the First Report of the Select Committee on Religious Offences in England and Wales.
Citizens of the world: Please post this on your own blog so that we can get a wider exposure for this. 70 signatories is a poor show for a modern secular nation.
Forgive us when we cock things up
From the “You couldn’t make this shit up” department:
This story from the Romford Recorder is just too precious retarded:
A PEARLY Queen’s Cockey slang version of the Lord’s Prayer recited during a formal council meeting has sparked an official complaint.
The modern interpretation of the prayer was brought to the Town Hall by the Pearly Queen of The Old Kent Road, Doreen Golding, who was invited by Havering Mayor Georgina Galpin.
The Pearly Queen, dressed in her traditional outfit, joined the 52 members of Havering Council and several officers and opened the Full Council Meeting on Wednesday, October 17, with her cockney rhyming slang-ridden version of the Lord’s Prayer.
The prayer, recited daily by thousands of Christians, was converted to include the phrases “ave a butchers” (look), and “give us some Uncle Fred” (bread), colloquial terms and abbreviated words.
What the story fails to report is to whether it was up-their-own-arse christians, non-christian theists or non-theists who made the complaint. It it was made by christians, I would then ask them if they would make the same complaint if it were made in, say, Latin? Somehow, I doubt that they’d be so black-affronted if it were. Or would it be that they might imagine that their god is offended by supplications ululated in anything other than King James’ English?
Not that I advocate any kind of special religious representation in government, even local government, but while it’s allowed (or at least tolerated) in the UK, then at least give each their own chance to chant their respective mumbo-jumbo in their own way, and then get down to the business of reality.
The full story, and full version of the prayer, are available in this week’s Recorder, which I don’t have a copy of and am not in a position to pop to the newsagent’s to get, although I do know plenty of people in that neck of the woods, so I’ll put the feelers out to see if one of them could ‘ave a butchers on my behalf.
Lahverly.
Belief-based politics (UK edition)
I was just watching the BBC News 24’s morning report on the Conservative party conference before I headed off for work, and what do I spy on the little graphical ticket at the foot of the tv screen?
[David] Cameron wants “politics based on belief”.
No. Nonono.
NONONONONONO.
We want politics based on reality, but let’s assume for a second that the quote has a wider context.
After a brief perusal of the BBC News web site:
“It wasn’t just that we have heard it all before – literally heard it all before – simplistic short-term pledges rehashed and reannounced, with absolutely no indication of how they would be delivered.
“It wasn’t just the cynicism of announcing things that Gordon Brown himself must know he can’t deliver.
“It was the carefully calculated pitch to the 4% of voters in the middle who might switch this way or that.”
He will say the Conservatives “had to do better than that” and reach out to disaffected ex-voters who “don’t believe a word of it any more”.
“We have to inspire them. We have to change from the old politics of easy promises and disappointment to politics you can believe in.
“That means politics based on belief.”
Politics you can believe in = politics based on belief?
NO!
I hope that this was just an equivocal faux pas from Cameron, but the fact that it can be so obviously soundbited (soundbitten?) makes me wonder if the statement wasn’t a deliberate non sequitur which he can, at some later point, use to appease either faithful voters, or turn it around and be equivocal for those of us who think he’s being an asshat.
Coming from an avowed highly political active christian, this concerns me mightily.
Either way, it was either a very clever, or very stupid, thing to say. I sincerely hope it was the latter.
The qualities of the faithful
At a recent christian fair trade conference, Labour MP and government minister Stephen Timms made the following comment:
There is positive impact when people of faith are involved in the lives of their community, because these people bring valuable qualities in their service which are rare elsewhere and they are qualities modern Britain urgently needs.
It’s not reported by Ekklesia as to what Timms thinks are these valuable qualities
actually are, nor if indeed these qualities are actually valuable, but from reading some of his speeches from his web site, he seems to think that simply having “faith” is enough of a virtue in itself.
Inexplicably, I’m not convinced. Like all socially progressive activities claimed exclusively by the religious, there’s no reason why these things can’t be both motivated and achieved without resorting to superstition.
I’ve never heard of Timms before, but apparently he’s the Labour Party’s “vice-chair with special responsibility for faith communities”, whatever that is.
On his web site, Timms writes on christian socialism:
It is clear from the Bible that Jesus was not only a man who empathised with people’s problems, but was a man who took action to change them. It is my hope for this generation that people who are committed to following the lifestyle of Jesus will seek to engage in politics and with the political authorities, as Jesus himself regularly did.
From my own reading of that same book, I remember an episode whereby the Jesus character also told people that they should sell all of their belongings and give the proceeds to the poor. I wonder if Timms is willing to go that extra mile for his biblical convictions, seeing as he’s so adamant that it’s the basis for social responsibility.
Somehow, I think not.
Even more faith schools?
Recently, the UK government (in the guise of the aptly named Ed Balls) and a bunch of mutually incompatible (are there any other kind?) religious groups decided to get together and tell the rest of us that they want to control more state schools, and that we should all pay for them, regardless of whether we’re religious or not, and the government published a report about it (PDF).
They also decided that the status quo – any non-religious school should still be subject to current laws – which the report summarises as:
All maintained schools are required to have a daily act of collective worship. In schools without a religious character, this must be wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian nature; while in schools with a religious character, collective worship may be in accordance with the tenets and practices of the religious designation of the school. The Government recognises the value of collective worship in schools in contributing to young people’s spiritual, social, moral and cultural development and to exploring social and moral issues and their own beliefs
should remain. I guess the christians must have played their “the UK is a christian country” card to win over the other groups.
Anyway, in the spirit of this, we’ve decided to come up with a handbook for non-religious schools, which contains some choice christian moral teachings. We present an extract in the form of a page from this book below.
We’re looking to get this published for the beginning of the 2008/9 school year. We think it’ll be a massive hit because, as everyone knows, one can’t have morality without religion, and the christian scripture is just so replete with prime examples.
Thankfully, the NSS and the ATL step in to the fray in an attempt to put this nonsense to bed.
Who wants to pay for churches? Not me!
The Church of England (CofE) is using the popular 10 Downing Street e-petitions web site to try and get the government to get tax payers to pay for repairs to church buildings. I say “piss off, godboy”.
Their petition is as follows:
We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Arrange for the cost of repairs to C of E church buildings to be reimbursed to help preserve our archeological & historic heritage for the future.
Churches are a valuable part of our heritage and a major tourist attraction, yet the funding of repairs is left to the parish in which the building is situated. Thus the cost of maintaining a national asset is left to the minority. This is grossly unfair and should be rectified.
Hiding behind heritage and tradition (the last true bastions of religious nuttery in a mostly secular society) they are seeking to get the government (i.e. us tax payers) to pay for the maintenance of the buildings owned by a single religious sect. These buildings, while being part of the history of Britain, are not owned by the state, nor by the populace at large — they are private buildings, owned by a sect that currently manages in the region of £5 billion in assets.
My problem lies with this statement: Thus the cost of maintaining a national asset is left to the minority. This is grossly unfair and should be rectified.
My emphasis. These buildings are not a national asset — they are a private asset, belonging to a what is essentially a private club. Therefore, it is right that the members of this club should be the ones to pay for any repairs or maintenance it requires.
Although the above page of the CofE web site states:
The Church Commissioners own some 125,000 acres of agricultural land. They are conscious of their duty as a long-established landlord and one of the country’s largest landowners. Financial criteria play a key role in their decisions about sales and re-lettings, but they recognize the importance of good landlord and tenant relationships
they still abdicate responsibility to others wherever they can, as demonstrated by a recent case where they used an ancient law to force a couple to pay for the renovations to their church.
[G]ood landlord and tenant relationships
, my arse!
There is, however, a counter petition in place, with the aim of petition[ing] the Prime Minister to refuse to reimburse the Church of England with public funds for repairs or maintenance to their own, private buildings.
The Church of England is petitioning the government to reimburse it for the cost of repairs to church property under the guise of historical heritage. Should the church wish to maintain buildings it owns, it should somehow raise the funds itself, especially considering it currently owns approx. £5billion in assets.
Please add your name to the counter petition (UK residents/citizens only). I don’t know about you, but I don’t fancy paying for the repairs to overly ostentatious buildings that I have no access to. If the church decides to donate these buildings to the state, however, I wouldn’t have a problem with it — they’d then become truly public buildings, open to all.
They god-botherers currently have over 7,000 signatories. We have 7, and need a hell of a lot more.
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/ChurchPay4Church/
And if you’re still in the petitioning mood after this, there are also a few others that you might be interested in, which can be found in the ‘petitions’ links to the right/below this article.
The Wedge Strategy: why “intelligent design” is a religiously political, not scientific, movement
For those of you who don’t know, in 1998 the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (now called the “Center for Science and Culture“), a division of the Discovery Institute, the bastion of the creationist/intelligent design (c/ID) movement, published an internal manifesto to promote religion over science, which they called The Wedge Strategy.
This document detailed the Discovery Institute’s plan to insinuate creationism, now calling itself “intelligent design”, as the dominant idea in the public psyche through the debasement of empirical science and postmodification of the social sciences and humanities.
Initially, the strategy begins with an introduction that reads like standard christian propaganda. The very first paragraph reads:
THE proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built. Its influence can be detected in most, if not all, of the West’s greatest achievements, including representative democracy, human rights, free enterprise, and progress in the arts and sciences.
As you can see, these assertions are made unapologetically, without any evidence to back them up, and taken as a given. At best, these statements are intellectually dishonest; at worst they’re a prime example of historical revisionism.
We can appreciate it, though, when we consider the audience expected to be the only ones who were to read it: right-wing fundamentalist evangelical christians, i.e. the internal audience of the Discovery Institute. Fortunately, they weren’t the only ones to have access to this document which was leaked onto the Internet in early 1999.
The rest of the introduction is just the usual poor scholarship and christian self-agrandising egotism that we’ve come to expect from creationists, designed to influence those who are already of a mind to support christian theological ideas and those who don’t usually think critically about baseless claims. It equivocates philosophical naturalism and methodological naturalism, philosophical materialism and social materialism, and misrepresents both the natural and social sciences.
One of the most telling portrayals of the c/ID movement also features in the introduction, which states that Discovery Institute’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies
.
While this sounds like it could be relatively innocuous propaganda, one must consider what they consider to be ‘materialism’, and on this point they are equivocal as mentioned above. Arguably, one could be mistaken in taking this as an assumption, so we will leave this point here for the moment. I would, however, like to make one additional point: in the original document (PDF), this phrase was afforded such import that it was placed in a cutline in the centre of the first content page!
The main body of the document contains the main goals of the ID movement (which I’ll come on to in a moment) and the three-step plan for how the strategy was (is?) to be implemented, which consists of three phases:
- “Phase I: Scientific Research, Writing & Publicity” indicates the programmes in “scientific research, writing and publicity” that the Discovery Institute would sponsor, including individual scholarships and research programmes into paleontology and molecular biology with scientists sympathetic to the c/ID movement.
- “Phase II: Publicity & Opinion-making” lists the marketing opportunities that they would use to promote their ideas, include teacher training, television productions, apologetics seminars,
opinion-maker seminars
and publicizing books (presumably written by ID advocates with the support of the Discovery Institute). - “Phase III: Cultural Confrontation & Renewal” notes the facets of academia that they seek to insinuate, with
academic and scientific challenge conferences
and a research fellowship programme with a goal toshift [from natural sciences] to social sciences and humanities
. It also shows that they expect to be challenged in the courts, as they also mentionpotential legal action for teacher training
!
The focus on the shift…to social sciences and humanities
mentioned in Phase III, the so-called “soft” sciences, shows that they presume that the natural sciences had already been (or were in such a state of confusion to be considered as to be imminently) overcome. The social sciences are the major platform from where they could promote their doctrines of christianity, increase their stranglehold over subjects such as philosophy and ethics and further the application of revisionist ideas to history, literature, and so on.
The goals of the Strategy themselves are the most damning of all. Detailed within the goals, already mentioned as having five- and twenty-year timeframes, we find the meat of the desires of the c/ID movement.
In the “governing goals” we find the statement that explicitly notes that intelligent design is creationism in disguise:
To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.
My emphasis. Here we can plainly see that intelligent design is equivalent to creationism. In fact, the Strategy also notes that their theistic understanding
is incompatible with current scientific understanding, which they seek to replace, not augment or improve. ID is therefore not a scientific hypothesis, it’s an alternative to it.
Within the five-years goals, we see another telling admission:
To see the beginning of the influence of design theory in spheres other than natural science.
This disclosure tells us two things: that they have already decided that “design theory” is a legitimate alternative explanation for any number of conclusions of the natural sciences, without any scientific validation of these hypotheses; and that their goal is to introduce itself into the social sciences and humanities, where it can have greater influence in a social context.
In the twenty-year goals, we find the (in my opinion) the most incriminating acknowledgment that intelligent design is not a scientific outlook:
To see intelligent design theory as the dominant perspective in science.
Emphasis as original. Again, this tells us a couple of things about the agenda of the c/ID proponents: they are not interested in methodological scientific enquiry into ID: they have already decided it is a valid theory (or, more accurately, the only valid theory; that they do not care about the conclusion of bona fide scientific enquiry; and that they admit that they seek to infiltrate all aspects of science with a presupposed hypothesis without confirmation.
All of the above conclusions are supported by details in the aims of the Five Year Strategic Plan Summary
, which include the following:
[t]he social consequences of materialism have been devastating … [t]hat source is scientific materialism
[i]f we view … science as a giant tree, our strategy is intended to function as a “wedge” that … can split the trunk when applied at its weakest points
[d]esign theory promises to … replace it [science] with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions
[w]ithout solid scholarship, research and argument, the project would be just another attempt to indoctrinate
we are supporting vital writing and research at the sites most likely to crack the materialist edifice
we seek to cultivate and convince influential individuals in print and broadcast media, … think tank leaders … congressional staff, college and seminary presidents … and academic allies
we also seek to build up a popular base of support among our natural constituency, namely, Christians
[w]e intend … to “popularize” our ideas in the broader culture
[o]nce our writing and research have had time to mature … we will move forward with direct confrontation with the advocates of materialist science
[w]e will also pursue possible legal assistance in response to resistance to … design theory into public school curricula
[t]he attention … should draw scientific materialists into open debate … and we will be ready
[w]ith an added emphasis to the social sciences and humanities, we will begin to address the specific social consequences of materialism
Emphasis as original.
In conclusion, it’s clear to see that:
- ID is rebranded creationism, which they deny
- the identity of the designer is consistent with the idea of the christian god, which they deny
- ID is promoting a viewpoint not only consistent with, but based on, the christian religion
- ID is intended to replace science, not explain it, contrary to their claim that they seek to explain the natural world
- the ultimate goal of ID is to act as a “wedge”, through the natural sciences, into the social sciences and humanities, which are more conducive to the promotion of theological ideas and more accessible to the public
- they aim to popularise ID within the public sphere to make it difficult for scientists to defend against
- they consider philosophical materialism and social materialism as equivalent
- they consider paleontology and biology as the two places where a “wedge” can be placed for maximum effect, consistent with their historical attacks on Darwinian evolution and the fossil record
- they aim to influence political, academic and famous individuals to their cause
- their plan includes an attitude of ‘biding their time’ until society is accepting of ID
- they intend to litigate to ensure adoption of ID in schools
- they want to create an environment where christian attitudes are prevalent in society
The creationist/intelligent design proponents are lying. It’s not science, kids, it’s religion. Don’t do it.
Catholics get 20 months leeway on adoption
Tony Blair last night announced Roman Catholic adoption agencies will not have an exemption from gay adoption rights, but they will have a delay of 20 months before implementing the equality laws.
The Prime Minister, who brokered the compromise in an intensive round of telephone calls over the weekend, appeared to have won over the opposing sides of the Cabinet. The compromise also appeared to have done enough to avoid a damaging clash between the Church and State over the gay adoption rights, which some agencies warned would leave them with no option but to close down.
Full article over at The Independent, additional commentary at The Telegraph, The Guardian.
Show your MP the delusion
Over at PledgeBank is a new pledge to supply each of Britain’s MPs with a copy of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion.
I will arrange for my MP to receive a copy of Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion but only if 645 other people (one per UK constituency) will do the same for other MPs.
Special treatment for catholics?
As reported in The Independent on Sunday on 21 January 2007, the news that the catholic church is pressing the British government to allow an exeption to the recently passed anti-discrimination law regarding sexuality has reached the mainstream media (BBC, The Times).
At the moment, only Ruth Kelly and the prime minister, Tony Blair, are supportive of the catholics’ attempt to change the law to their own demands. Kelly is a known catholic, and Blair is a catholic supporter (his wife, Cherie Booth, is a catholic) and has had meetings with both the currrent pope and his predecessor. Blair, it is thought, is expected to convert to catholicism after he leaves government office.
As I noted previously, Ruth Kelly, the Secretary of State for Communities, is hardly the best person to represent those who are discriminated against, especially considering that she a) is a strict catholic (and probably a member of Opus Dei); b) has abstained from every single major vote on homosexual rights.
Today I learned that, not only is the government considering relenting to the demands of the catholics to allow them (and only them) to legally express their bigotry but, that this government is attempting to subvert the welfare support system by actively promoting religious-welfare programmes (source: DWP).
So, what does this mean?
At the moment, the catholics are attempting to get an exemption to anti-discrimination legislation, which would allow them to refuse to accept adoption requests from homosexual couples.
The Department of Work and Pensions is aiming to promote religious supply of more mainstream welfare services (of which adoption is already one) such as support for the homeless, etc.
Mr Murphy announced he was hosting a national seminar in the coming weeks that will bring together faith organisations of all persuasions to discuss how they could contribute further to the welfare state and what more the Government can do to facilitate this.DWP press release
If this exemption goes through, and the government funds religious groups to offer state-sponsored welfare programmes, what is to stop the catholic church (or any other church) from further demanding extra exemptions for these programmes? The precedent would already have been set, and it would be more difficult (legally) to turn back the clock.
What this would amount to would be the Vatican dictating public policy, determining how the welfare infrastructure of Britain would be run. It would also allow for any special interest group to assert that they too are also eligible for special treatment.
I fear having our government policy, and hence our legal, economic and welfare systems being dictated to from the Vatican or by the whims of any other group. If I wanted to live in a theocracy, I’d move to one.
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