Apathy Sketchpad

This is probably going to be quite a long post, and also contain at least a little bashing of Islam, so if you read it you can apparently be executed now, so I’ve politely hidden it behind what I’m told in Blogger-Speak is called a “fold”.

So clearly the Afghan Senate are on my shortlist this month. They have since decided to withdraw their insane demand, but they haven’t let the guy go either. So that’s one.

Another fine choice for Religious Crackpot of the Month would be The Bishop of Carlisle who, I learned reading Terry Sanderson’s rather excellent Guardian blog,

revealed that the government had, for more than two years, “been in conversation with church leaders about the possibility of the church providing extensive welfare services, rather in the way that the church plays a major part in education”. Part of this, apparently, is a 20-year contract for “Christian groups bidding to deliver dentistry”.

On that ticket,whatever part of the government he’s referring to should also win, but I don’t like to take his word for anything because as the article points out, “he was the man who said the disastrous floods last summer were the fault of homosexuals”.

Or, I could award the accolade to another government department, for approving the quite perverse request from the Association of Muslim Schools and the Christian Schools Trust to allow them to vet their own schools rather than have Ofsted do it. Their argument is that inspections should “carried out by people who understood their distinct Christian and Muslim ethos”, rather than Ofsted, who just understand unimportant things like education. Apparently the new faith-school body which will vet these schools will be called “the Bridge Schools’ Inspectorate”, although I intend to call it ‘Ofcult’.

Or, I could award it to the Pope. He’s constantly getting into trouble for one thing or another, and even in the short time since the whole Galileo thing kicked off he’s managed to offend my rational atheist sensibilities again, this time by claiming that scientific investigation should be accompanied by “research into anthropology, philosophy and theology”, as if theological research makes the slightest bit of sense. The moment he comes up with a falsifiable hypothesis in theology I will, of course, change my mind, but he isn’t going to because he doesn’t understand science that well. Ekklesia said:

The speech was described as “thoughtful” by a number of the participants in the conference, non-religious as well as religious. It echoed the concerns of humanists as well as faith leaders for a consonance between scientific rationality and personalist philosophy.

However the newsbrief of the National Secular Society in the UK immediately dismissed the speech as “anti-science stupidity”.

Good old NSS.

Another contender is the USA whose state constitutions, I discovered this week, are full of anti-atheism discrimination, (despite the overall constitution ineffectually banning exactly that) including such gems as Texas’

No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office, or public trust, in this State; nor shall any one be excluded from holding office on account of his religious sentiments, provided he acknowledge the existence of a Supreme Being.

Sticking with the anti-atheism discrimination theme, I could just as easily give the award to MySpace, who recently deleted the single largest group of atheists anywhere in the world, just for being a large group of atheists. They’ve also been, apparently, deleting any overtly athiest signs from user profiles. This is not long after they personally intervened to help a similar group for Christians which was the victim of a hacker.

This kind of thing is pretty-well exactly what I expect of MySpace. If they weren’t interested in cynically manipuating the public, I can’t imagine what use the site is. Possibly I’m missing something here, but this, to me, is what MySpace does:

1. All users can make a public page.
2. Users can link their pages to other pages.
3. Users can send each other messages.

Well, surely that’s just the internet!? I can do all of those things without Rupert Murdoch and his insane band of right-wing zealots watching over me the whole time and making sure I behave. So MySpace is effectively a little self-contained internet with a large corporate governing body that can censor you, and they’re not afraid to do so. It’s the internet, but with the single best bit of the internet removed.

Or, I could give it to Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who “has called for new laws to protect religious sensibilities that would punish “thoughtless and cruel” styles of speaking.” Strictly, I should call him “Dr Williams” but I’m not going to because he’s only a “doctor of divinity” and that’s not a real qualification by any reasonable standard. Possibly he gained his DD by doing all that theology research Ratzinger’s so keen on.

Rowan Williams, Doctoral Thesis

Subject: Divinity

Title: Does the Bible Condemn Adultery?

Methodology: I read the Bible and paraphrased it.

Conclusions: Yes.

Then again, I could just as easily give it to the Egyptian judge who ruled that people who left Islam couldn’t have their ID cards update to reflect this because Sharia law says you’re not allowed to stop being a Muslim (but then, it would say that).

Or, Dawkin’s Funeral. Or the protest that didn’t happen at Heath Ledger’s. Or Rod Liddle, who recently attacked the National Secular Society for “[taking] a discriminatory stance against people who believe in God” and being “a pressure group whose raison d’être is that it doesn’t believe in anything [unless] it is simply to persecute and harass those people who do”. The NSS exists to promote secularism, not atheism. They want “abolition of all privileges granted to religious organisations”, not simply an end to religion. Attacking them for discrimination against the religious is like attacking Martin Luther King Jr. for discrimination against white people.

So I’m a bit stuck for a decision this month. There are too many even to have a Religious Crackpot of the Week. It’s getting dangerously close to the point where I could do this full time and have a Crackpot every day if there was any way of making any money out of it. This last week I reckon I could have done it every 12 hours.

So I have to choose now. I’m ruling out the Pope and the artist formerly known as the Department of Education, because they’ve won it before. I think I’m going to rule out Carlisle too, because it’s unclear who’s to blame for all that and I can always give them a future award if it becomes necessary. I’m going to rule out the states of the USA too, because that was centuries ago. I think that, probably uniquely in the history of awards, it comes down to a choice between MySpace and Rowan Williams. As awful as Sharia ‘law’ is, I’d like to keep this a little lighter than that. We all know it’s barbaric, and there’s really no need for me to blog every single thing it does wrong. I can’t afford that kind of webspace anyway.

And in the end I’ve chosen MySpace, because… well basically because I like them the least.