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Manchester councillor Pat Karney, who’s responsible for the city centre, wants to ban the Christian Voice demo from chanting vainly at future Pride parades. The tiny band of narrow minded protesters have been a fixture of the parade for a few years. Last year I filmed an interview with one of them before the parade started. Annoyingly I have yet to get the footage onto a computer to do anything with it. They’re something of a sad bunch- except in their own heads where they’re no doubt fighting bravely against a tidal wave of sin and perversion- but they definitely shouldn’t be banned.
Twenty or so homophobes with banners get lost amongst the thousands of people who’ve come out to see the spectacle, spot friends and enjoy themselves. It’s almost symbolic- a tiny minority calling for a return to bigotry and oppression surrounded by the mass of open minded and joyful humanity. They shouldn’t be banned, that just feeds into their self righteousness and imagined martyrdom, they should be allowed to come back every year and humiliate themselves. Perhaps the realisation will filter through to some of them that they’re missing out on the joys of being a decent caring human being and find a nicer denomination or (even better) none at all.
As pointed out by some of the commenters on the report, Karney’s call, if not outright hypocritical, does show a lack of joined up thinking. If hate laws must be used to silence a few delusional god-botherers why weren’t they used last year to keep the English Defence League out of Manchester? The EDL’s values are just as wrong, if not moreso, and they’re a far nastier bunch to have to deal with. If you try to stop evangelicals showing their ignorance in public then you’re giving the Catholic church room to call for protesters with valid questions about clerical child abuse to be hidden away when the Pope visits.
Let Christian Voice protest all they want. The crowd will prove how wrong they are.
As I’m in an ongoing comment argument (on this post) with a couple of homophobic morons who think their religion gives them special dispensation to be bigots I thought I should show that some Christians are decent people who view the world from an adult perspective rather than one tainted by a few sentences in the Bible. I don’t share their religion, and I’ll no doubt disagree with them about a lot of things, but I respect their mature attitude to others.
Academics have found evidence that, as recently as the 18th century, the church never used to have a problem with homosexual relationships and marriages. In fact most religions took a more enlightened view in the past than they do now. What happened to silence the decent wings of these religions and have the reactionary bigots dominate the debate?
This link was supposed to be part of last nights link dump from delicious, but the database/server was having one of its tantrums and they didn’t appear. I’m posting this one in particular because it was mentioned in the comments to this post.
It was the sight of peach juice dripping from the chin of a teenage French female nudist that led a Cambridgeshire public schoolboy to convert to Islam.
Really? That’s the sort of thing that would have made me want to convert to being French. But I never went to a public school, who knows how that could upend your priorities.
The moment is given a little more context later in the article
“In my teens I was sent off by my parents to a cottage in Corsica on an exchange with a very vigorous French Jewish family with four daughters,” Winter recalls. “They turned out to be enthusiastic nudists.
“I remember being on the beach and seeing conjured up before my adolescent eyes every 15-year-old boy’s most fervent fantasy. There was a moment when I saw peach juice running off the chin of one of these bathing beauties and I had a moment of realisation: the world is not just the consequence of material forces. Beauty is not something that can be explained away just as an aspect of brain function.”
It had quite an effect on him: “That was the first time I became remotely interested in anything beyond the material world. It was an unpromising beginning, you might say.
“In a Christian context, sexuality is traditionally seen as a consequence of the Fall, but for Muslims, it is an anticipation of paradise. So I can say, I think, that I was validly converted to Islam by a teenage French Jewish nudist.”
Nope. I’d still rather be French than religious. (And that’s not being snide. I’m fond of our Gallic neighbours. If I ever manage to finish a comic project it will be more suited to the French than US market. They make some very good films. Their pop music is awful, but their hip-hop is quite interesting. They also do interesting tax breaks for artists. Admittedly the Belgians make better beer, but nowhere’s perfect.)
Can your beliefs about religion make it across our intellectual battleground?
In this activity you’ll be asked a series of 17 questions about God and religion. In each case, apart from Question 1, you need to answer True or False. The aim of the activity is not to judge whether these answers are correct or not. Our battleground is that of rational consistency. This means to get across without taking any hits, you’ll need to answer in a way which is rationally consistent. What this means is you need to avoid choosing answers which contradict each other. If you answer in a way which is rationally consistent but which has strange or unpalatable implications, you’ll be forced to bite a bullet.
I got the second highest award available, having to bite two bullets for inconsistencies. I might not have had to take those if the questions had been phrased differently, so I’m claiming a partial language waiver on them.
via Pharyngula
The New Scientist has a special report on the roots and methods of denialism. Should be useful reading for anyone who ever finds themselves talking to creationists/climate change deniers/9/11 Truthers/anti vaccination types/that bloke in teh pub who knows what really happened to Elvis.
How to be a denialist
Martin McKee, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who also studies denial, has identified six tactics that all denialist movements use. “I’m not suggesting there is a manual somewhere, but one can see these elements, to varying degrees, in many settings,” he says (The European Journal of Public Health, vol 19, p 2).
1. Allege that there’s a conspiracy. Claim that scientific consensus has arisen through collusion rather than the accumulation of evidence.
2. Use fake experts to support your story. “Denial always starts with a cadre of pseudo-experts with some credentials that create a facade of credibility,” says Seth Kalichman of the University of Connecticut.
3. Cherry-pick the evidence: trumpet whatever appears to support your case and ignore or rubbish the rest. Carry on trotting out supportive evidence even after it has been discredited.
4. Create impossible standards for your opponents. Claim that the existing evidence is not good enough and demand more. If your opponent comes up with evidence you have demanded, move the goalposts.
5. Use logical fallacies. Hitler opposed smoking, so anti-smoking measures are Nazi. Deliberately misrepresent the scientific consensus and then knock down your straw man.
6. Manufacture doubt. Falsely portray scientists as so divided that basing policy on their advice would be premature. Insist “both sides” must be heard and cry censorship when “dissenting” arguments or experts are rejected.
A junior civil servant has been “put on other duties” after distributing a memo with some silly, and quite funny, suggestions for events to mark Pope Benedict’s visit to the UK in September.
The Foreign Office has apologised for a “foolish” document which suggested the Pope’s visit to the UK could be marked by the launch of “Benedict” condoms.
Called “The ideal visit would see…”, it said the Pope could be invited to open an abortion clinic and bless a gay marriage during September’s visit.
…..
The document went on to propose the Pope could apologise for the Spanish Armada or sing a song with the Queen for charity.
It listed “positive” public figures who could be made part of the Pope’s visit, including former Prime Minister Tony Blair and 2009 Britain’s Got Talent runner-up Susan Boyle, and those considered “negative”, such as Manchester United striker Wayne Rooney and prominent atheist Richard Dawkins.
If anyone should be apologising at the moment it should be the Catholic church, for so many things I won’t even start listing them.
Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, wants employment tribunals involving Christians to be adjudicated by judges “with a proven understanding of religious issues”. In other words, judges who’ll rule in favour of the Christian defendant no matter how weak their case. This was reported as a good thing, to be supported and defended, by the Daily Mail and inspired the usual drivel from Melanie Phillips. Just imagine the frothing anger that would have been on display if a prominent imam had said it instead. (And is it any surprise that they make Lord Neuberger, with his very Jewish name, the bad guy of the report and opinion piece?)
Workers have every right to refuse to perform certain tasks if they deem them to be dangerous, illegal or counter productive. I don’t believe that using your religion to justify your prejudices counts as a valid reason not to do your job.
These people think he is. I was searching for something completely different, but this was too good to pass by.
The world is expecting the antichrist to come in the near future. Will the antichrist announce his arrival when he gets here? An essence of evil surrounds the term antichrist, and evil rarely works openly. Instead, evil usually wears a facade of righteousness to cover its real character in order more easily to deceive.
THE ANTICHRIST HIDES BEHIND A FACADE.
What better facade than a “church” to cover the antichrist’s real identity? The Bible tells us that Satan, the devil, “deceives the whole world.” (Revelation 12:9). Everyone in the world has been deceived by the devil and by his agent, the antichrist.
ATROCITY
Hitler has been thoroughly condemned by the world for murdering six million Jews during the Second World War. This holocaust is frequently talked about even today, and many books have been written on this subject condemning Hitler and his associates.
THE GREATEST ATROCITY
During the Dark Ages the Catholic Church slaughtered over 150 million Christians, and this atrocity is never mentioned today! The world has almost completely forgotten the many millions of people who were burned at the stake by the papacy because they wanted to worship God according to the Bible.
The slaughter in Bosnia, Kosovo, Serbia, and Croatia is a direct result of the Vatican’s involvement in this area, but you will never hear about it because the Jesuit-controlled news media not only refuse to mention it but they lie about the situation to keep the papacy from being suspected of their true involvement.
In the lobby of the University of Texas at San Antonio’s humanities building, a hand-drawn poster announces, “Free porn: Just trade in your holy books (Bible, Koran, Vedas) for porn.”
A student group at the university called The Atheist Agenda is reviving its Bibles-for-porn program, called “Smut for Smut,” for three days beginning March 1, according to a report from San Antonio’s KENS-TV.
The idea is that when you look at holy books, a lot of the content is far more objectionable than any issue of Playboy, which is what the group are giving away.
I did promise the author of this blog post, which claims that conspiracy theories are suddenly more true than reality, that I would provide a detailed response. But it’s going to be too long to waste on someone else’s comment section, so I’m publishing it here.
Conspiracy theories tend to say more about the theorists than the alleged conspirators. I’m going to approach the examples cited by asking two questions- If the theorists are correct, what do the conspiracists get out of it? and Why might the theorists want to believe in this particular conspiracy? So-
“1) The theory: mass immigration is being used to re-engineer society.”
What do the conspiracists get? Errrrm. What do they get? According to the theory the mostly white, mostly christian engineers of this massed social change get a country where they lose a lot of their privileges because their constituents are less like, and less likely to vote for, them. And we know how willing MPs are to give up their privileges.
Why might the theorists believe in this conspiracy? Because they’re racists? Because they don’t like immigration? Possibly, as a great many of them claim to be christians, they’re scared by falling church attendance and don’t want to have to fight for believers with a younger, louder religion.
“2) The theory: climate change is not primarily manmade, but is a ruse to impose a world government which will tax and control us.”
What might the conspiracists get? They’d get to pay more tax. Which I’m sure they really want to do. The scientists will get to keep the funding which pays for their research. Even though they could be better off working in the private sector. I have a problem with the repeated line about paying more tax. The people who’ll pay more tax are the ones who are too dumb to find ways to make their lives more efficient. Those who cut their carbon emmissions will find they’re paying less money to corporations, and the government, so they will have more money for themselves and be financially more secure.
Why might the theorists believe in this conspiracy? See the last bit above about people too dumb to make their lives better.
“3) The theory: the BBC is a propaganda machine for liberals and socialists.”
What might the conspiracists get? The licence fee cut by the next Conservative government. Though that will probably happen anyway.
Why might the theorists believe in this conspiracy? Because Fox News is Fair and Balanced.
“4) The theory: the 9/11 attacks were an inside job.”
What might the conspiracists get? The satisfaction of having turned real life into the opening sequence of the first X Files Movie .
Why might the theorists believe in this conspiracy? Racism? Brown people couldn’t possibly have organised something this big, it has to be the work of the Illuminati and/or the Jews. (An early 9/11 conspiracy theory had all Jewish workers in the World Trade Centre being called up and told not to go in to work that day.) An inability to grasp reality. Given all the genuinely horrible, stupid, illegal and dangerous stuff the Bush regime did, why on Earth do some people need to make stuff like this up?
“5) The theory: the Theory of Evolution is a 19th Century misunderstanding, which is now clear from modern scientific discoveries.”
What might the conspiracists get? Confused, given that modern discoveries strengthen and refine the Theory of Evolution.
Why might the theorists believe in this conspiracy? Fear that science, and increased understanding of it, will undermine their religion. Inability to visualise a simple and elegant theory. The writer of the post is a Creationist, so this is a favourite subject of his. He claims masses of evidence for his belief, but can never present any that stands up to scrutiny.
This is a bit of a rambling post, because I started it as a comment then brought it over here. Feel free to add your own comments and help me refine and better explain my reasoning that way.
We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to ask the Catholic Church to pay for the proposed visit of the Pope to the UK and relieve the taxpayer of the estimated £20 million cost. We accept the right of the Pope to visit his followers in Britain, but public money would be better spent on hard-pressed schools, hospitals and social services which are facing cuts.
Sign the petition.
via Pharyngula.
Jamie Reed is the MP for Copeland, which is where my parents live. His blog is relatively new, so I’ll give it a bit of time to grow. Wikipedia tells me he declared himself a Jedi in his maiden speech, so he can’t be all bad. I may have fallen out of love with Labour, but I’d support him for the Copeland seat in the coming election. Tory polling puts them a close second and the BNP a distant third but with enough support to be disturbing. Copeland may be 99.3% white, according to this list (nearby Allerdale and Eden are even whiter) but that’s no excuse for supporting the racist moron party.
The Tory candidate for Copeland is Chris Whiteside. He’s a Conservative, so I took an immediate dislike to him. But we’ll see how he fares over time.
John Redwood used to be referred to as the Vulcan. It wasn’t just because of his elongated and Spock like face, but because he was supposedly a man of great intelligence. Sadly that vast intellect isn’t in evidence when he posts nonsense like this about climate change. Rather than finding out about the subject he’s latched onto the talking points which conform to his ideologogy and prejudices. His specialist area is economics, I believe. Let’s hope he actually investigates and thinks about that before opining. Hope, but, on the evidence, don’t expect.
Stewart Cowan is a Creationist and homophobe (and possibly a few other things, I’ve only been reading since yesterday). I’m sure we’ll have lots to talk about. It may be borderline classing this one as a political blog, but I found it through a comment on Jamie Reed’s blog and decided it should be included here.
Warning This blog is based upon, and contains, spoilers. I may revise it after watching The Book of Eli and you may not want to read it until you’ve seen the film.
The Book Of Eli opened last week and I’m going to see it on Wednesday. On the surface it’s your standard post apocalypse tale, with Denzel Washington wandering through the desert beating people up. And it has Gary Oldman as the bad guy- he’s usually fun. So I’m optimistic.
Of course, as I spend too much time on the internet, I’ve read some spoilers. I know that the book Eli carries, and that everyone’s so desperate to take possession of, is the last known copy of the Bible. Hearing this, some folk have stepped up and declared Eli an evangelical film. Though with the premise being that the apocalypse was the result of a huge holy war and a plot about religion being used to control people maybe some of us won’t get the same message from it.
If I was Eli I wouldn’t be toting around a Bible, especially not if I were surrounded by reminders of the sort of horror wrought by those who preached it and other holy texts. It would long ago have been consigned to fire lighting or toiletry duties (some of those good books are made from really soft paper) and I’d have gone raiding abandoned Waterstones for more useful literature.
For day to day survival how about Outdoor Survival Handbook: A Guide To The Resources And Materials Available In The Wild And How To Use Them For Food, Shelter,Warmth And Navigation and Food for Free ? For longer term plans there’s The New Complete Book of Self-sufficiency and The Off-grid Energy Handbook . As an introduction to the sort of thinking needed rebuild a civilisation I’d grab something like A Short History of Nearly Everything and maybe Engineering: A Beginner’s Guide to explain some of the basic principles of construction. The list could go on. Over time I’d build up a library of such informative material, and set up a school to make sure others could read and use them.
The Bible’s an important book to a lot of people. But if you’re rebuilding civilisation, particularly after it’s been destroyed by superstition, it’s one of the last books you should be referring to.
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