Seriously? You want me to believe that half the population of London actually think that see-through dead people float through the city rattling people’s drawers? I’m sorry, but that simply isn’t plausible to me. I know people are easily led and a bit gullible. I accept that. But I thought Theos said that 34% of people believe in Jesus and 33% say they’re not sure. You can’t simultaneously accept Christianity and believe in ghosts, and that only leaves 32%. Okay, so there are error margins on this but I don’t for a second accept that all atheists believe in ghosts — because I’m one and I don’t. Someone would have taken a photograph by now. I don’t think there’s anything that exists that hasn’t been photographed, aside perhaps from the Higgs Boson.

The director of Theos, Paul Wooley, said

The extent of belief will probably surprise people, but the finding is consistent with other research we have undertaken.

It’s consistent in that they all report implausibly high belief in ridiculous ideas, yes. Then he said

The results indicate that people have a very diverse and unorthodox set of beliefs.

…which I thought very charitable to the respondents.

I think what Theos are increasingly discovering is that surveys can’t be trusted. They are repeatedly finding that a sizable fraction of the population will say yes to anything you care to ask them. I’m quite prepared to believe that London is an unusually credulous city, but given that the 2001 survey tells me that 1.4% of its population is Jedi, I’m tempted to think it might also be a city that doesn’t poll well.

And astrology? Really? Surely by now everyone in the world knows that astrology columns are just written by whoever happens to be passing at the time, with no thought or reference to any source of knowledge, just like the science reporting. I don’t believe that 22% of the population think that the stars and planets control their lives. I don’t accept that a fifth of the people I see in the street really believe that the arbitrary shapes drawn in the sky by convention dictate their fortune.

Are they counting ‘I suppose there might be something in it’ as a yes? Are they excluding ‘I don’t know’ responses from the results? Did they phone round houses in the middle of the day? We don’t know, because Theos’ press release doesn’t say. But any of those seems more likely than 4 million Londoners believing in ghosts. Nobody believes in ghosts. It’s a lunatic fringe belief, like crop circles or fairies.

First of all was the story of Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, the Archbishop of Recife’s decision to excommunicate a woman who helped her daughter get an abortion. The daughter was nine. She needed an abortion because her Catholic stepfather raped her. The rapist was not excommunicated. The Vatican supported all of this, so the only way these actions make any sense is if the Vatican considers abortion worse than raping a nine-year-old girl. And that nearly makes sense, except that the girl would probably have died in childbirth, so even if you consider her twin fœtuses ‘people’ you still have to be pretty warped to expect her to die for the crime of being raped. (Warped, or Muslim.)

After that, the Vatican calmed down a little and celebrated International Women’s Day, by — I know, this has to be gold, doesn’t it? — by publishing an article asking the question “What in the 20th century did most to liberate Western women?” and reaching the rather brilliant conclusion that it was probably the invention of the washing machine. Not the right to work. Not women’s suffrage. Definitely a machine that makes cleaning clothes (which clearly is Women’s Work) easier. I mean, even if that’s pragmatically true (which it isn’t) don’t say so right after you’ve okayed raping small girls.

It’s lucky the Pope isn’t at all utterly terrifying.
photo credit: openDemocracy

After that piece of light-hearted batshit whimsy, the Pope decided to refocus his efforts on Catholicism’s core competency: ruining innocent people’s lives with arbitrary and idiotic dogma. This time, it’s Africa’s turn. Speaking about the AIDS epidemic there, the Pope himself, not a lackey this time, said “the distribution of condoms… aggravates the problems”. The Telegraph have found themselves a priest to defend him — and let’s mention now that I’m only inferring he’s a priest from his photo. Nowhere do they bother to actually mention that he works for the Pope, because that might be a bit too much like declaring one’s interests for the mainstream media. Their priest, George Pitcher, rehashes the same old argument I’ve heard over and over again: “that the Church’s historic teaching that chastity outside marriage and fidelity within it would prevent the spread of killer diseases such as Aids”. And this is true, but alas irrelevant, because nobody is criticising that teaching. (At least, I’m not. At the moment.) What we are criticising is the Pope’s claim that distributing condoms will make the AIDS epidemic worse. This claim is demonstrably false. It turns out that if you grow up and go with the facts instead of just making shit up, you can actually make a difference and save some lives.

The problem I have with the Pope’s speech is not that he advocated abstinence: it is that he specifically lied about something that we know works. Even if nobody acts on his advice, if they believe the epidemiological claims that he makes then they will make bad decisions and people will die.

It’s mostly dull, but this bit is worth mentioning:

Tomorrow, delegates at the Liberal Democrat conference will have a choice of supporting the heritage and future of [faith] schools, or supporting a policy that would damage that which helps make them so successful. We hope that they choose to back the clear consensus of public opinion as reflected in the Guardian’s own poll published this week, which showed 69% of those with school-age children support a religious ethos in schools.

It seems to me that the argument is completely empty: there’s no reason to think that a school’s religious ethos would be damaged by admitting pupils who didn’t subscribe to that religion. I went to a church wedding last year, and spent the entire time resolutely not-believing in God, and yet the whole thing went off without a hitch, all the while exuding religiosity. The actual beliefs of the participants is completely irrelevant: me toeing the line and sitting quietly at the back of the church looks exactly the same whether or not I accept the ideas being preached from the front of it, and that’s as it should be. The whole thing is worse when there are children involved, because the idea of what they believe is fuzzier: an adult can believe in God and while they’re still wrong we must at least respect that they’re capable of deciding for themselves what they believe (even if they choose not to). With children that’s less true: a seven-year-old Christian is just parroting what his parents taught him. Even I was a Christian at that age (I think — I really don’t remember much from that long ago). The idea that you have to have pupils of a particular religion in order to maintain a school’s ‘character’ is a ridiculous claim made to justify a form of discrimination that should have been banned decades ago.

To me, the strongest argument against faith schools is that they don’t give children a chance to be who they want to be: a child from a Muslim family at a Muslim school with Muslim friends is not really being given any opportunity to develop in any other direction than strict adherance to Islam. That works out great for Islam, but pretty badly for the child, who may turn out to be gay or rational and have massive problems reconciling these natural traits with his imposed faith. I would solve that by banning faith-based education, but a good compromise is to allow culturally-religious schools such as the one avowed atheist Marcus du Sautoy’s children attend but ban them from discriminating.

The first two sentences of the letter are:

Tomorrow, the Liberal Democrats will debate education policy, including their position on the country’s 7,000 schools with religious character. The debate needs to be informed by facts and not conjecture.

Let’s see some facts, then. I would like to see a single scrap of evidence for the claim that discrimination is required to maintain the effectiveness of faith schools. I fully expect that there isn’t any.

Suppose you got a massive bucket of bricks that weighed more than all but the fattest bastard. Clearly it is a bad thing to weigh more than it. Say then that every year you removed a brick, until it weighed the same as someone merely fairly chubby. It is clearly still bad to weigh more than the bucket of bricks. It is still true that those heavier than it die younger than those lighter. Only now, loads more people are heavier than it — primarily because it’s so much lighter than it used to be.

You now understand logic better than The Christian Institute:

A new in-depth study has added to mounting evidence that being born outside of marriage damages children. The report, compiled by researchers at the University of Essex, says that 44 per cent of babies are now born to unmarried parents. Cohabitees are estimated to make up three-quarters of those parents.

Well, technically, but hold on…

A new in-depth study has added to mounting evidence that being born outside of marriage damages children.

What? The study does no such thing. It says that co-habiting parents are more likely to split up than married ones (a fact which has many interesting causes, none of which involve Jesus), that children whose parents split up are worse off than those whose parents stay together, and that more children are being born out of wedlock.

Well yes, but unmarried couples are staying together longer than they used to: because the point at which the average couple marry — the number of bricks in the bucket — is changing. It’s not an illusory problem, and I’d hate to imply that it is, but the simplistic spin put on it by the Christian Institute (”The Christian Institute exists for the furtherance and promotion of the Christian religion in the United Kingdom”, so no agenda there) is just pathetic. To support that conclusion, you want a large cohort study, with a group of children of married parents and a matched group of unmarried ones — with similar incomes, social class, inteligence, location, and so forth, as any of those and other factors could affect odds of break-up and children’s welfare. That wasn’t even hinted at in any account of the report I can find. (I don’t think a RCT where the participants are unaware whether they’re legally wed would be particularly useful, but it would certainly be funny.)

And remember: the CI is a charity. Every time someone donates to them, the income tax paid on that is handed to the CI. So you funded this article. And so did I. And I’m cross about that, because it’s like everything I hate most rolled into one.

• Government Agrees Rescue Package For Snowmen (original submission)

Now the others. Tip of the hat to anhodika for inspiring the first one and to Smudge for the headline on the second one. (Community site, see?)

Straw refuses to publish details of amendments to Freedom of Information Act

Following backlash against the scrapped publication of Parliamentary minutes from the run-up to the Iraq war, Jack Straw has announced that there will be a series of reforms to the current Freedom of Information Act. He promised reporters that the new Act would be more efficient and less easily circumvented, but he refused to divulge how this would be achieved or exactly what the proposals were.

Speaking on BBC Radio 7, he said that the new rules would stop politicians ‘publishing embarassing information in obscure places where it would be unlikely to be widely seen, such as Hansard or this show’. When asked where the information would instead be published, Straw looked puzzled, and after a pause said that the new proposals favoured openness but that the specifics of the proposals were not intended for public dissemination.

Straw went on to explain that while it is important that the public has a right to access information about government, that must be balanced with other concerns, such as security. ‘Of the nation?’ prompted the presenter, to which Straw replied, ‘well yes, obviously, but also of my job.’ When pressed for more information, he explained that ‘if the public know how to get information, then so do al-Qaeda, and that could pose serious threats.’ Instead, the government is set to bring in a replacement Act, whereby the public has a right to access large amounts of government information, including Parliamentary minutes and MPs’ expenses, but will not be told how to do so. He promised, however, that details of the process would be made freely available to anyone who asked to see them, as long as they submit their request in a correctly formatted letter to the new Information Commissioner’s office, whose address was also available on properly presented request.

The new Act is expected to come into force at the start of April, however Straw promised that information important to the public, such as war minutes and MPs’ expenses, would be covered by the new rules immediately ‘to aid transparency in government’.

Book readers ‘must destroy own memory after last page’ - Authors Guild

The Authors Guild have announced that they are to take legal action against Mike Bradshaw, a 23 year old chemistry student at Durham University. The Guild alleges that Bradshaw ‘described the plot’ of Stephen King’s ‘Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption’ to Patricia Hunter, another local student, at a party at a friend’s flat two weeks ago.

‘I don’t know what the problem is,’ Bradshaw told reporters. ‘I wasn’t even talking about the book - we were discussing films and I said I liked The Shawshank Redemption. Patricia asked what it was about and I told her. I don’t know how they ever expect to sell old books and films if people aren’t allowed to reccomend them to each other.’ Roy Blount Junior, president of the Guild, have said that their members do not have a problem with reccomendations per se, but have stressed the difference between simply stating that you enjoyed a book and explaining what the book is about. The latter, they claim, is infringment.

Blount went on to clarify that in any case the court case was not strictly about Bradshaw’s recounting of the plot, but in fact was about the ‘illegal copy’ of the book that Bradshaw had stored in his memory. ‘Memorizing passages, phrases or plot details from a book is creating a copy which is not allowed by copyright law,’ Blount explained. ‘The author receives no remuneration for this copy and we cannot be sure that the holder of this copy is not creating derivative works in their imagination, for example, placing our members’ characters into situations the authors never intended, or even allowing characters from different authors’ works to meet. In any other medium, this would be unacceptable. Why should the mind be any different?’

Meanwhile, communications company T-Mobile are planning a case against Miss Hunter, claiming that their own copyright was infringed when she gave Bradshaw an unauthorised copy of her mobile phone number.

Obama ’still getting all Bush’s mail’

Official documents released today have shed light on how smoothly the transition form Bush to Obama administration has gone. The reports reveal that an early attempt by Republicans to claim ownership of the White House under common law on the grounds that Bush had lived there uncontested for eight years has been rejected because actually many people complained about it almost constantly. A smaller complaint from Bush himself was noted but not acted upon: apparently Bush was upset as he was ‘just getting the hang of this President thing’.

Obama has had fewer complaints, the main one being that he is still receiving all Bush’s old mail. The report mentions at least one copy of ‘Guns And Ammo’ magazine and several personal letters. There is even some mail arriving from previous White House resident Hillary Clinton, although some of this has arrived from companies that did not exist eight years ago, suggesting she may have sent out over-optimistic ‘change of address’ cards during the primaries.

The report goes on to mention official statistics from Canadian immigration authorities, who have noticed a marked decrease in unauthorised border crossings since November, except across the Western border where Canada meets Alaska, where crossings have slightly increased.

Most worryingly for American citizens is the revelation that the second Amendment to the US Constitution, which reads ‘a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed’ may have to be repealed. The report claims that eight years is ‘plenty of time’ for a citizen malitia to rise up and defend the nation’s freedoms from attack from a corrupt government, and that if the people didn’t want to accept the responsibilities that come with gun ownership then they couldn’t expect to retain the right to it either.

First day’s play abandoned as players realise cricket is actually pretty dull.

All photos in January’s FHM look like airbrush artist’s ex-girlfriend

Colin Jones was one of many men who, after buying the latest FHM as normal this January, was surprised to find that all the models looked almost identical. Some of them were taller or slimmer, or black, but all of them had the same smile, the same blue eyes, and the same high but elegant cheekbones. FHM have received forty complaints about the incident, although it seems that the vast majority of readers did not notice, since the photo alterations only affected the models’ faces.

Jones, however, was one of very few men who recognised the repeated face. It was his neighbour, receptionist Miranda Lee. He took the magazine round to show her the strange phenomenon, expecting her to be puzzled, but instead she simply said ‘that b*****d!’ and stormed off. Lee drove immediately to her ex-boyfriend Craig Turner’s flat. Turner has worked for FHM touching up photos for six years, and had been unceremoniously dumped by Lee following a disastrous Christmas. When Lee arrived, she found Turner, who still harbours a strong desire to mend the relationship, had six copies of the latest FHM and several large printouts of the model photos.

FHM have apologised to their readers and promised to make ‘less-significantly altered’ photos available to readers on their website. Turner has since told reporters ‘the guys at the magazine were actually very understanding. They said they weren’t going to fire me for it but that I should be more controlled in future. Apparently, almost all of the complaints were about the Rachel Stevens shoot — if I’d left that one set alone, probably nobody would ever have known. The worst part of it is that I’m never going to get Miranda back now. She thinks I’m a creep and she’s getting loads of attention from men. They don’t even know why they fancy her.’

Tabloid Editors Apologise to Jade Goody

At a press conference today, representatives of Britain’s tabloid press have apologised for their treatment of Big Brother contestant Jade Goody over the last few years.

The editor of the News of the World read aloud a statement in which he expressed ‘deep regret that [they] painted her as a stupid, vacuous bimbo’. He went on to say that ’since the details of her disease were released, [they] have come to realise that she is, in fact, a brave young woman struggling against difficult circumstances’.

The group have pledged to support her in the future, and have given her a regular column in the Express, which will be released unedited ‘in case her erratic spelling and unconventional use of facts are important in the way she expresses herself’.

Controversial bishop promises to deny smaller atrocity

The ultra-conservative Catholic bishop Richard Williamson, whose excommunication was lifted by Pope Benedict XVI earlier this year, has broken his silence and released a statement in which he promisese that he will accept the historical truth of the holocaust and instead deny a series of smaller atrocities against the Jewish people.

Williamson had been under fire for his claims that ‘there were no gas chambers’ and only 300,000 Jews were killed in concentration camps. The true figure is nearer to six million. He now says that he will accept there were gas chambers, and from now on will instead deny that episode of South Park where Cartman makes Kyle watch The Passion Of The Christ.

A full list of Williamson’s new beliefs about the oppression of Jews, which were agreed upon after long consultation between Jewish spokespeople and Williamson’s assistants, has been posted on the Vatican website, and includes a claim that Fourth Council of the Lateran did not force Jews to wear the Judenhut, and a denial of the full horror of Zoe Wanamaker’s role in My Family. A denial of the phone calls made to Andrew Sachs’ voicemail was ruled out at an early stage of discussion due to their sensitive nature, but Williamson will be allowed to exaggerate the success of Clement Freud on Just A Minute.

When asked by a reporter whether he considered it dishonest to change his historical beliefs for political reasons rather than as a result of new evidence, Williamson replied ‘no, I’m a Catholic’.

Jaguar hit by wildcat strike. More soon.

1,500 attend first convention of casual Doctor Who fans

Over 1,500 casual Doctor Who fans gathered in London last night for TARDIS, the new convention specifically aimed at the idle viewers who enjoy it when it’s on but certainly wouldn’t stay home to see it. Most of the attendees lived locally. According to the convention’s Facebook page, entitled ‘who want’s [sic] to meet up re. dr.?’, casual fans from further afield were put off by the amount of effort involved in a trip to London.

Many guests came dressed as their favourite Doctor, usually David Tennant, who was generally referred to as ‘The Second Doctor’. Sarah White, a housewife from Hackney, said the event had been fun. ‘I dressed up as Rose Taylor,’ she said, ‘although I dress like this most of the time anyway. I always watch Doctor Who, because my children love it, and I guess it’s pretty good sometimes, so it was nice to be able to come here and discuss other things with like-minded people. I had a lovely chat about local restaurants with a man dressed as a Cyberman, although to be honest I couldn’t really hear him over the crumpling tin-foil.’

To open the event there was going to be a montage of clips from the first series since the re-launch, played to the extended theme song on a large screen in the conference hall, but this was cancelled after many guests said that they might want to watch that series some day and didn’t want to know what happens.

The pinnacle of the convention was a guest appearance by new Doctor Matt Smith, who will take over from David Tennant next year, and Doctor Who writer Steven Moffatt. Unfortunately, none of the guests recognised either, except for one who had seen Moffatt on a Coupling DVD extra.

OK! Magazine reject new slogan ‘Where Celebrities Go To Die’.

Base rate of interest ‘just made up number’.

As part of a wider plan to inspire confidence in banking by a policy of absolute honesty, the Bank of England was forced to admit this week that the so-called base rate of interest is in fact ‘just a made up number.’ Following the slashing of the rate due to the current economic downturn, many high-street bank executives realised that they didn’t actually have to pay any attention and kept their rates exactly as they were. A manager at Lloyds TSB told reporters, ‘why should we do what they say? It’s just a number they put out every so often. We don’t adjust our rates based on what Natwest do, or the current terror threat level, or any of the other meaningless numbers people release these days.’

Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, said that the base rate was ‘at best, a way of keeping score.’ According to King, the rate is lowered when things look bad ‘to try to make people feel like we [the Bank of England] are doing something,’ and raised again when things are more stable ‘partly so that people feel that everything is normal, but mostly so we have somewhere to lower it again next time everything goes pear-shaped.’

Economists have reacted angrily to the news, saying that in fact the Bank of England is central to the national financial infrastructure, and any change in their rates has a wide-reaching impact. They say there are ’sound economic and financial reasons’ why banks should pay close attention to the rate and adjust their policies accordingly, however King, speaking on a panel of high-level banking officials, dismissed this argument as ‘just what we tell you.’

Other ‘honest banking’ proposals include the scrapping of ‘introductory’ high rates for savers, renaming many common bank charges to ‘greed tariffs’, and the ending of the requirement that bank employees smile.

One of the most senior figures in the Catholic Church in England and Wales has defended his decision to allow a known paedophile to continue working as a priest… The archbishop said he had been acting on advice from professionals at a time when the behaviour of child abusers was not as well understood as at present. … Documents seen by the BBC suggest the archbishop ignored the advice of doctors and therapists who warned that Hill was likely to re-offend. … He later became chaplain at Gatwick Airport where he abused a boy with learning difficulties.

Archbishop Murphy-O’Connor has now agreed that boys abused by the priest should receive compensation, but as part of the settlement they were required not to speak publicly about what happened.

I’ve linked to this story before, but I think it bears repeating, because according to the Times,

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor is on course to become the first Roman Catholic bishop to sit in the House of Lords since the Reformation… The Archbishop of Westminster looks almost certain to be offered a peerage after his retirement, which is expected within weeks.

Gordon Brown’s brilliant plan, then, is to let this man have a direct say in public policy without ever facing an election. This man whose poor judgement allowed children to be abused. This liar and hypocrite. This ardent anti-secularist. This man should be allowed a vote in the houses of Parliament. I’m sorry, no. This man should be sidelined, marginalised and ignored like the unrepresentatively right-wing liar in the increasingly unpopular and irrelevant cult that he so clearly is.

We’ve already had one secretly-Catholic Prime Minister this century, who’s now promoting religion as the answer to everything. The government have opened 84 faith schools in the last 11 years despite polls showing they’re unpopular. Why are they so keen to push faith down our throats? Religion is a great tool for controlling the masses, but it only works if the masses genuinely believe it, and we clearly don’t. Even people who profess faith are generally secularist in politics. This is just going to make Labour even more unpopular than they already are. It’s like they’re throwing this election on purpose.

I can’t see any way of looking at this other than as just one more bizarre gift of power from this government to religion. The alternative is that Brown genuinely believes that Cormac Murphy-O’Connor would be a good member of Parliament.

Frankly, I’m not sure which is scarier.

prayforyou RT @Forestpelt Please pray that @Forestpelt’s 2 atheist friends will find Christ. Pray that God would shine through @Forestpelt to them. about 1 hour ago from web

Andrew_Taylor @prayforyou This ought to be the single most elegant demonstration that prayer doesn’t work we will ever see. about 1 hour ago from twhirl in reply to prayforyou

prayforyou We have a challenger saying we will only prove that prayer doesn’t work. Everyone pray so we’ll prove to @Andrew_Taylor the power of prayer. 22 minutes ago from web

Come on then, God. This should be an easy one. Convince two people you exist. I mean, I don’t want to pour scorn on Your infinite power at all, but I can manage this task pretty easily. I’m almost sure that everyone at work is totally convinced I exist. So come on, God. Pull Your finger out.

Call me cocky if you like, but I’m pretty sure I can win this bet. Convincing atheists of his own existence is one of God’s weakest suits. He’s much better at tasks that only involve committed theists.

Maybe it’s all the praying they do.

Before that, he… er…

Okay, I don’t know what the word for the opposite of ‘excommunication’ is. I shall use ‘incommunication’.

Anyway, Pope Ratzinger has incommunicated a former cleric thrown out of the church for being a Holocaust denier. He can’t be a priest again unless he changes his mind, apparently, but he’s still back in the church. The Pope’s explanation is that he didn’t know about his views on the Holocaust when he lifted the excommunication. Smart readers will have spotted that that story makes no sense, and the reason it makes no sense is that I made a mistake. Here, I blithely assumed that a Holocaust denier thrown out of a religious order with a professed moral authority might have been thrown out because he was a Holocaust denier, but it turns out that he was thrown out on a technicality. More bizarrely still, he has in the last hour built a bizarre simulacrum of utter reasonableness and issued this statement:

Since I see that there are many honest and intelligent people who think differently, I must look again at the historical evidence. It is about historical evidence, not about emotions, and if I find this evidence, I will correct myself. But that will take time.

For a Holocaust denier to say something like that is simultaneously massively encouraging and terrifying, but given that his job is to promote belief in Jesus, a man whose historical existence is predicate on a handful of accounts of his life written decades after the event and who claims to be the son of a virgin and an invisible wizard who lives in the sky, it’s just too surreal to try to analyse further.

I had no idea this quote existed when I started this post. Every time you look into the inner machinations of any church nonsense like this appears. The whole system is so entirely unhinged that any place you choose to dig will lead to something like that pretty soon.

I mention it principally because I was surprised to read in the news that Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, a cleric I despise more than most, not least because he is complicit in the sexual abuse of children, had done something good for a change by publicly criticising the Pope for this, in a letter to the Chief Rabbi…

Dear Chief Rabbi,

I am writing to express my dismay at the effect of the Vatican decree releasing from excommunication bishops consecrated illicitly. Specifically I naturally deplore the comments made by the Englishman, Rev Williamson, in his denial of the full horror of the Holocaust.

His statement and views have absolutely no place in the Catholic Church and its teaching. Pope Benedict’s reaffirmation of this on 28 January 2009 was made very clear when he expressed “full and unquestionable solidarity with our brother and sister recipients of the First Covenant … May the Shoah be for all a warning against forgetfulness, against denial or reductionism, because violence against a single human being is violence against all”.

Perhaps I should add that the lifting of excommunication is only a first step towards reconciliation of the bishops concerned. None of them is yet able to exercise any office either as priest or bishop in communion with the Catholic Church.

I put this in writing to assure you of our continued understanding and friendship. In these difficult times we are called to bear witness to peace and goodwill. I like to think this is especially true of relations between the Catholic Church and the Jewish Community here in Britain.

With kindest wishes,

Yours sincerely,

Cormac Card. Murphy-O’Connor
Archbishop of Westminster

…but then I read the letter and it turns out he didn’t actually say anything at all.

I can’t work out why that’s considered news. He doesn’t criticise the Pope at all (which is fair enough as he didn’t do anything wrong in this case), despite what the Telegraph may think. He basically says “I think it’s a shame that undoing a piece of beaurcracy happened to increase the number of Holocaust deniers in the church, but it’s not that big a deal. We’re still cool, right?”. Which is fair enough, but why report it?

Christian Scientists Split God

A group of Christian research scientists in Massachusetts announced this week that they had managed for the first time to split God, also known as the Higgs particle although mostly to annoy physicists, into his component parts. God is believed to have existed in the conditions immediately prior to the Big Bang.

They made the discovery using a machine called the Holy Smoke Chamber. A fragment of the True Cross was accelerated to 40% the speed of light and collided with a King James Bible. The 25m wide device is cooled by a constant stream of holy water. A team of 5 priests work round the clock blessing the inbound pipelines. Researchers were able to detect two of God’s components in the debris from the explosion.

According to Christian scientific theory, God is composed of three smaller particles called father, son and holy spirit. The trace from the Holy Smoke Chamber clearly shows a trail for the son particle, which curves gracefully through the chamber for five nanoseconds before ascending into heaven, more-or-less in line with the theory. The father particle’s trace, however, did not agree with calculated predictions. The researchers have admitted that the way the father particle moves is ‘mysterious’, but are confident an explanation will be found. The holy spirit particle was not observed. The Christian scientists believe that this particle passed clean through the chamber like a ghost.

Most Christian scientists agree that the father and son particles could tell us a lot about the universe if we can unlock their secrets. The experiments have been criticised by others, however, who claim that earlier work by Revelation et al suggests that recreating the son particle on earth could trigger a process known as ‘armageddon’, which potentially could wipe out life on Earth.

DCSF delight as exam results show which pupils are stupid

Schools minister Ed Balls has expressed his delight at a ‘mixed bag’ of exam results, which he says ‘accurately show which pupils are clever and which are a bit stupid.’ When the results were announced, Gordon Brown described them as ‘disappointing,’ saying that ‘we had hoped more students might achieve the top grades,’ but Balls now claims that the purpose of exams is to gauge the different ability of students in various subjects and that a good distribution of grades, including fails, is needed to accomplish this.

‘This is absolute nonsense,’ said Beverley Hughes in an interview earlier today. ‘The purpose of testing students is to demonstrate how wildly successful our education reforms have been. We had been looking forward to another year of record-breaking exam results, and the exciting possibility of introducing a new top-grade to cope with the number of pupils achieving A* at GCSE, but now the system has been hijacked by teachers who just want to know how their students are doing.’ Insiders say the planned introduction of the new grade, tentatively named ‘AA1*+’ was intended to be a much-publicised event designed to underline the runaway success of both students and the Labour Party. The introduction has been put on hold pending an improvement in exam grades.

Employers have praised the latest results, saying that their similarity to the previous years’ results will make it easier to compare job applicants who sat them in different years, as well as clearly showing which pupils are habitual underachievers and should not be considered for important jobs. It is even thought that preventing stupid people from entering highly paid and responsible jobs could help the economy in the long term, and employers have been looking for a system of doing just that for many years, but Children’s minister Delyth Morgan has said that national exam results should not be used in this way. ‘This isn’t what they were designed to do. They are purely a tool for demonstrating the achievements of our department and the government in general.’ Some employers have gone so far as to suggest that some government ministers have a vested interest in maintaining the status-quo in which unqualified and incompetent people can remain in well paid, high-power jobs simply by engineering a series of spuriously inflated exam results. Ed Balls has strenuously denied these rumours, citing a government spreadsheet which would ‘authoritatively debunk these rumours’ had he not left the CD on a bus.

Analogue Switchoff: Your Questions Answered

Will I need to get a new TV?

No. In most cases you will need to purchase a digital receiver box to plug into your existing set. This will enable you to receive digital broadcasts after analogue is turned off. Most analogue TV will be switched off by 2011, but your area may differ.

Will I need to get a new radio?

Eventually. Analogue radio is being continued longer than analogue TV. No date has yet been set for this but sometime around 2015 seems likely. When this happens you will need to purchase a ‘DAB’ Digital Radio.

Will I need to get a new clock?

Yes. When analogue time is turned off in 2020, old-style analogue clocks will stop working. You will need to upgrade to a digital clock to enable you to continue telling the time. You will probably already own a digital clock as it will be built into your digital radio.

What other analogue products will need replacing?

If for some reason you still own a video cassette recorder, you will need to replace it with a Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) player. You will also be unable to play vinyl records and audio cassettes and will need to replace these with digital media such as MP3s or CDs.

Is there anything else I should know?

In 2025, analogue description will be turned off. Among other changes, you will no longer be able to describe the height of a person by gesturing and saying ‘about this high’. You will need to give a figure. You may continue give this figure in feet and inches as long as you also provide a metric estimate. For reference, six feet is approximately 1.5m, and two inches is roughly 0.05m.

Atheist Buses to be followed by Agnostic Trams, Troubled Billboards

Following the success of the so-called “Atheist Bus” campaign, other irreligious groups have launched similar efforts. The atheist message being plastered across buses throughout Britain reads “There’s probably no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Next week sees the launch of the “Agnostic Tram”, which bears the message “I don’t know if there’s a god - I’m just a tram.” The group behind the “Troubled Billboard” has not yet managed to agree on a wording, but the current favoured text is “There must be more to life than just this, but there’s so much bad stuff in the world… oh, why is it so complicated? I just try to be nice, what else can you do?”. The organisers had hoped to get a bus advert too, but it rapidly became apparent that there simply wouldn’t be enough space.

Commuters in Huddersfield have recently started seeing adverts in train stations which say “We don’t know if we actually believe in God, but we are spiritual”. In one case, this advert is running right next to one that reads “I don’t know whether or not there’s a God, but there definitely aren’t any Thetans.” Nobody yet knows who paid for the double-page advert in Monday’s Telegraph which simply stated “oh, God, I’m so depressed.”

Surprisingly, a recent MORI poll asking which religious beliefs were most common found that most Britons agreed with the statement “I don’t care enough either way that I feel I have to paint it on a bus”.

Civilian deaths in Gaza. More soon.

UN Troops Help Woman With Own Personal Battle Against Cancer

Long-term cancer patient Amanda Myers, 42, was surprised earlier this month when fifty UN troops arrived in her hospital ward to help with what had previously been her own personal battle against cancer. Also surprised were the soldiers, who had previously been deployed keeping the peace in the Middle East. ‘They didn’t seem to know why they were there,’ said Myers. ‘They’ve been very helpful, though. Supportive and always happy to pop to the shops when I need something.’

President of the UN Security Council Jean-Maurice Ripart told the press that after accusations that the UN did nothing about the oppressive regime of Saddam Hussein, the UN was keen to regain popularity by fighting something that everyone would support. What happened next is unclear, but it is known that the council discussed removing a rogue head of state, but had difficulty coming up with anybody suitably unpopular. After a number of names were dismissed as either only ambiguously dangerous or too obscure, the British delegate suggested cancer, having forgotten that English humour is not always understood by other nations.

A representative of the hospital where Myers is being treated said ’strictly, we’re not supposed to allow visitors to stay in the ward 24/7, but when I explained this to the sergeant, he said “I don’t think so, Sir” and didn’t move. In the end we just let them stay. They haven’t caused any problems, apart from the two trasnsplant patients killed last week by friendly fire.’

So far, the UN say, the tumour in Myers’ lung has ’stubbornly refused to negotiate’, but they remain confident of victory.

Terrorist changes mind after seeing atheist bus advert

Police were called to a bus in London yesterday after a man was seen emptying an unidentified liquid onto the floor of the vehicle. Witnesses say he then dropped the bag and ran out of the bus laughing. Police analysis confirmed that the liquid was an explosive mixture of flour and peroxide which the would-be terrorist had apparently chosen not to detonate.

‘I spotted him as soon as he got on the bus,’ one witness said. ‘He looked troubled and was carrying a large bag. He seemed to get more and more agitated until he ripped open his bag, jumped out of his seat, and got off as quickly as he could at the next set of traffic lights.’

Following a brief investigation, police believe the man was an Islamic fundamentalist, most likely working alone, who was plotting to blow up the bus in protest at supposedly immoral western culture, but when getting onto the bus had read the advert on the side which says ‘there’s probably no God, now stop worrying and enjoy your life.’

The man has not yet been identified, but someone matching his description was seen that evening, sitting in the corner of a strip club with a bottle of tequila and a copy of ‘Unweaving the Rainbow’.

Bush refuses to let Obama move into Blair House early

“I know the feeling” - Gordon Brown

Crop circle found that says ‘there probably is’.

OfCom say Prince Harry video ‘outside remit’

Despite receiving hundreds of complaints, OfCom have refused to rule on the alleged racial slur in a video made by Prince Harry three years ago and released recently by the News of the World, claiming that home videos are not subject to their guidelines.

One complaint, leaked to newspapers, reads ‘I would like to complain in the strongest possible terms about the despicable language used by “Prince” Harry in the recent programme “That Video He Made”. Although I myself am not in Harry’s squad and did not see the events in question, I found the seven seconds of out-of-context commentary which I read about in a reputable newspaper [sic] three years later deeply offensive, and I would like to know what measures will be put in place to prevent it happening again.’ OfCom described the letter as ‘typical’.

Prince Harry, who made the offending remark, has already issued a statement saying that the term was used ‘without malice’ and ‘as a nickname’. However, in an interview with BBC News the soldier’s uncle, who wasn’t there, has never met Harry, and knows only what his nephew chooses to tell him about their relationship, claims otherwise.

The Daily Express has already announced that it intends to escalate the incident to the level of Scandal, and claims to have found a series of similar incidents involving racist remarks or actions by other members of the royal family. A spokesperson for the palace told reporters that he thought it ‘highly unlikely’ that the newspaper had unearthed such events, describing the royals as ‘highly reputable members of the international community’ who ‘would not engage in racism or stereotyping.’

Scientists admit Hadron Collider created Financial Black Hole

New compression algorithm discards information listeners are too uncouth to appreciate

Apple have launched a new compression algorithm developed to further extend the capacity of their iPod music players. The format, called XF2, works by discarding any information that the listener won’t appreciate anyway. For example, the best selling XF2 file at the moment is Alexandra Burke’s cover of Hallelujah, which when compressed contains no Biblical imagery or dark undertones at all.

Audiophiles have been outraged by the announcement and are boycotting the new technology, however the general public have warmed to it immensely. One user told reporters “it’s great; I’ve managed to get the entire back catalogue of Girls Aloud, Hearsay and Britney Spears onto my iPod, and there’s still loads of space left.” A spokesperson for Apple commented on this review saying “what’s really good is that in this case the algorithm produces lossless compression, because there was never really anything to that music to begin with. This allows the system to shrink the songs greatly without losing anything. Many so-called ‘boy band’ songs can actually be reconstituted entirely just from the titles.”

Some users have got more out of it than others. Michael Simon, a builder from Oldham, has found that most songs are very small files that download very fast, but Jason Cockburn, a writer from London, says that the music he downloads seems hardly to have compressed at all, with the exception of Don McClean’s American Pie. “That’s probably because it’s a stupid nonsense song anyway,” he said.

Apple have admitted the new system does still have some bugs: currently the algorithm crashes when trying to compress Bohemian Rhapsody.

The name ‘XF2′ does not stand for anything. In production the project had a much longer, cleverer name which was a reference to Dante, but that name has not been announced because the press release was XF2 encoded and it was felt that journalists wouldn’t get it.

Atheist bus on collision course with Church

Could Apple Juice Be Cure For Hiccups?

According to Professor David Cook of Durham University, the answer may be ‘yes’. The discovery was made yesterday, when Cook had hiccups and noticed they were gone later that afternoon. In an exclusive interview secured by chance in a bar, he said “I don’t know what did it. Possibly they just went away on their own. I know I’d had a glass of apple juice. I suppose that might have helped.”

This ground-breaking clinical research offers hope to millions of sufferers worldwide, and nutritionist Patrick Holford has already launched his own range of apple-juice based pills which you should buy. In a press-release, he said that healthy adults should probably drink fifteen glasses of apple juice every two hours or, failing that, take just one of his ‘Cidex’ brand apple-juice supplements.

Holford explains that the active ingredient in apples is the cell wall, which is much thicker than the membrane in human cells and therefore stronger. This means that the cells can be used to strengthen aspects of the human body such as the immune system, allowing patients to naturally fight off viruses such as the hiccups.

Sufferers of the hiccups are already demanding access to this new cure on the NHS, but NICE have remained adamant, saying that the treatment is unproven and therefore not cost effective. Newly founded support group JUICE has described this as ‘blatant bias and discrimination’ against sufferers of ‘a serious disease which is often under-reported’. They say that experimental treatments such as this should be made available automatically.

If you would like more information on where to get this amazing new medicine, contact Cidex Ltd. immediately, on 0845 123 4789.

I am listening to former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey chatting a lot of nonsense about atheists (link is to WMV). He has this to say:

We now live in a very dangerous and divided world. The urgent challenges facing us today is to build bridges of understanding and hope, and the religions have a very sturdy role to play in this regard but then, their contribution is being hindered not only by deep misunderstandings between the faiths, but more worryingly by a troubling polarisation between two intellectual worlds: faith and secularism. Or, if we prefer, faith and science.

I can’t find a transcript anywhere, so I have typed the relevant bits out myself (by which I mean, all of it except for i discourse on Darwin which I have little interest in discussing. For the sake of readibility, I have resisted the temptation to spell science ’sarnce’ which is what he actually says. (He sounds a lot like Brian Butterfield.) I’ve also been fairly generous with his mistakes, such as referring repeatedly to someone called ‘Hitchings’. It’s pretty long, so skim it or skip it if you like, but basically it’s an exercise in quotemining, so the fact I’ve reproduced it in its entirety ended up pleasing me.

…September the eleventh 2001, or 9/11 as we now call it is a key date in modern history. It can be taken to represent a watershed between West and Islam, and that is certainly true, but… it is also the date that symbolises a growing split between faith and reason, illustrated in the hostility to all religions by Richard Dawkins and others.

What amazes me the most about this entire speech is that he can casually refer to “a growing split between faith and reason” without ever wondering if that might mean that faith is unreasonable or if he should switch sides.

The attacks on the World Trade Center, Pentagon and the White House woke us up, all of us, to a resurgent and militant Islam which remains an active presence in the world today. Last week’s attacks in Mumbai sadly will not be the last of such atrocities. For some writers, such events are an illustration of the evils of religion - and all religions. I’ve no doubt that one can trace a direct link from 9/11 to the strident and agressive tones of such writers as Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and many others.

This is entirely correct. It is, of course, simply not true that Richard Dawkins wrote Viruses of the Mind in 1991. It is completely impossible that John Lennon wrote Imagine in 1971. It is furthermore wholly false that Lucretius wrote “…but ’tis that same religion oftener far hath bred the foul impieties of men” before Jesus was even (supposedly) born. Because there was no anti-religion movement prior to 2001. Someone who believes in a magic man who made the world has no doubt of it.

And the result is a widening gap between religion and science, an unwillingness to engage, concluding in a dialogue - a literal dialogue - of the deaf. And the purpose of such writers is to pour scorn on religious belief. They want to eradicate it, although they differ as to the chances of acheiving it. Hitchens, perhaps the most polemical of the writers, believes that monotheism is a plagiarism of a plagiarism of a hearsay of a hearsay of an illusion of an illusion extending all the way back to the fabrication of a few non-events. How ridiculous.

Ooh, great comeback. I appreciate you were talking to people who believe in Christianity’s various nonsenses, but even so, if that’s the best defence of them that you’ve got then what are you for? You’re the worst Archbishop ever.

Someone wrote, a journalist, about Hitchens recently that he takes the verbal equivalent of an AK47 to shoot down hallowed religious figures, questioning whether Mohammed was an epileptic, declaring Mahatma Gandhi an obscurantist who distorted and retarded Indian independence, Martin Luther King as a plagiarist and an orgiast and in no sense a real Christian, while the Dalai Lama is a medieval princeling who is the continuation of a parasitic monastic elite. Well, there you go.

Right, so you’ve quotemined him. Well done you. Do you have any idea what happens when someone takes all the nasty bits of the Bible out of context? (If not, the answer is that you get basically the Old Testament.)

And common to all this, seems to be a loathing of increasing religiosity in the United States’ politics which has, in their view, contributed to what is seen to be a disastrous presidency, and which has undermined scientific understanding.

I don’t think you still have to pad that claim with the phrase ‘what is seen as’. Watch how carefully Carey avoids explicitly endorsing any opinion at all in this speech. It’s masterful. At this rate, I imagine his pencil will run out of phrases like ‘might’ and ’some say’. It’s like listening to Wikipedia giving a speech. (I might start reading Wikipedia in his voice from now on.)

Dennet excoriates the madness of a faith that looks forward to the end of the world and the return of the Messiah — well, we are in the middle of Advent, aren’t we? Or starting of Advent. What Dawkins hates is that most Americans still haven’t accepted evolution and support the teaching of intelligent design. According to one poll, 50% of the US electorate believe the story of Noah as literal. And Dawkins argues that there’s nothing to choose between an Afghan Taleban and the American Christian equivalent.

Hence the phrase ‘equivalent’.

The genie of religious fanaticism is rampant in present day America. And Sam Harris, the author of two best-sellers, The End Of The World — sorry, The End Of Faith –

I shall resist any pop-Freudian analysis here, and further resist drawing attention to the Dennet reference earlier and the amusing juxtaposition of these two things. That would be mean of me.

–and Letter to a Christian Nation, similarly draws an analogy between Muslims and the American Christian. “Non-believers,” he said, “like myself, stand beside you dumbstruck by the Muslim hordes who chant death to whole nations of the living, but we stand dumbstruck by you as well. By your denial of tangible reality, by the suffering you create in the service of your religious myths, and by your attachment to an imaginary god.” And Harris is prepared to go [yet] further. He writes, “some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.” This extraordinary statement–

Before you go any further, I feel it’s only fair to remind you that Deuteronomy 13:6-9 says you should kill anyone who believes in any god but yours.

–is only slightly worse that that of Richard Dawkins’ opinion that labelling children by the religion of their parents is a form of child abuse.

Richard Dawkins’ well-reasoned and carefully justified opinion, let’s not forget. An opinion which you have neither managed nor attempted to counter with anything more compelling than an implicit dismissal. For someone who keeps banging on about conversations, you’re making a very poor job of engaging anyone at all.

Well, as one New York commentator put it, “we’re familiar,” he said, “with religious intolerance; now we have to recognise irreligious intolerance.” Well, it’s not hard to conclude that New Atheism, as it’s been called and if there is such a genre as that, is unpleasant and reactionary. The polemical and violent language is not an invitation to a calm debate, but belongs to the worst excesses of Hyde Park Corner oratory, and some of us have been there.

Well, of course it’s reactionary: it’s atheism. If there was no religion, we wouldn’t realise we were atheists, because the idea that there might be a god would never have occured to us in the first place. Anything done ‘in the name of atheism’ is by definition a reaction to religion. And let’s not forget that I could dredge up any number of quotes that would paint religion, and even God, in much the same unpleasant light. Cherry-picking quotes is not helpful.

Now, to some degree these writers do have a point, and we can sympathise to some degree when they challenge Creationism. Creationism is the fruit of a fundamentalist approach to scripture, ignoring scholarship and critical learning, and confusing different understandings of truth–

You mean, confusing things that are actually true and things you would like to be true.

–so in some parts of the United States there is one form called Young Earth Creationism. And this is the most literalist end of the scale, where the account in Genesis actually refers to seven 24-hour days. And according to this view, the world is really just a few thousand years old rather than millions, thus explaining away the fossil record and the geology of the planet.

It is a little known fact that the word ‘thus’ is a fantastically efficient logical shortcut. In mathematics, this is known as ‘proof by invocation of the word “thus”‘, and the journal Thus publishes upwards of a dozen, usually very short, papers which use this proof every month.

There’s another form called Old Earth Creationism, which accepts geological ways of dating the Earth by translating the days of creation to square with the evidence. And the battle in the United States has been visceral, and long-running, and raises questions such as the constitutional separation of church and state, as well as the internal debate in the academic community between the respectable world of science, and pseudoscience. Listen to the words of Dr Malcolm Brown, who’s director of the deparment of public affairs of the Church of England. And he wrote very recently, “at a university in Kansas, I asked a biology professor how he coped with Darwin’s theories with students whose churches insisted that evolution was heresy and whose schools taught creationism. And he said “no problem,” he replied. And, “the kids know that if they want a good job, they need a degree. And if they want a degree, they have to work with the evolutionary theory. Creationism is for the churches, as far as they are concerned; here in the university, they are Darwinists.”" Now, that’s breathtaking because such dualism is to be greatly regretted in the long run. It will undermine the intellectual integrity, not only of those students, but of the churches as well.

Well yes, but it’s a university’s job to teach, not proselytise, and if the students choose to learn without accepting then that’s their prerogative, and while the university should encourage them to accept evolution, there’s really nothing it can or should do to force them. If the churches suffer then that’s quite incidental. Let’s not forget that it is the churches in this story who are being dicks about it.

The theory of intelligent design has emerged as a more acceptable form of Creationism in recent years, partly to circumvent the bans in some parts of the United States when Creationism is being taught, and certainly more academically respectable, but criticised for its lack of scientific method–

So, not at all academically respectable, then.

–that is to say, its inability to test its hypotheses. Proponents of intelligent design look for evidence of an intelligent designer, rejecting the materialism of contemporary science. Thus they are always looking for clues of a designer in the complexity of genetic biology, and arguing for patterns and relationships. And the argument for intelligent design may have some appeal to many Christians, but is ultimately a negation of what science is all about, which is to make a hypothesis from what is observable, and then to conduct experiments in a constant process of testing. Now, this is not to say that the case for intelligibility in the universe… cannot be made, but care has to be taken that the scientific method is not subverted, and that faith itself is [not] brought into disrepute for a cavilier treatment of the evidence.

Good.

Just as science is in danger of assuming an arrogance in proposing that it can solve all of the universe’ mysteries, when the more humbe and realistic practicioner realises science is not well-equipped to tackle the metaphysical, so theology itself, aided and abetted by pseudoscience, can get above itself.

Not quite so good. Although it is true that science can only discuss things that are true.

As far as the controversy over Creationism in the United Kingdom is concerned, while some academies are said to have taught Creationism, the issue was not a serious problem in the Britain until very recently. In Septembert the distinguished scientist professor Michael Reiss suggested that Creationism — you may have followed this debate in the Times and some of the other papers too — in September, he argued that Creationism should be debated in the classroom if the subject is raised by the pupils. And unlike some of the newspaper reports, he did not suggest that it should be taught in science classes. And a lobby of high-profile so-called atheists campaigned against his remarks, and he was forced to resign as director of education of the Royal Society for bringing it into disrepute. And this tawdry opening of a rift between science and religion owed almost nothing to the facts, and indeed the way the Royal Society acted has brought it into disrepute.

His observation was that banning all discussion of Creationism could backfire. In fact his argument was that Creationism was not a scientific theory but an alternative world view.

I haven’t checked, but if that really was his argument then his argument was so dumb that he probably did bring the Royal Society into disrepute. Would someone explain the difference between a ’scientific’ hypothesis and a ‘world view’? (I’ve substituted the word ‘hypothesis’ because he has already used established he’s using ‘theory’ in the non-scientific sense.)

So if you have followed my argument so far, and agree that a serious and sustained conversation is lacking today, largely inspired by different kinds of fundamentalism, including that of the new atheists, what kind of conversation do we want to encourage in our universities? In our schools, in our workplaces? How can we open up this debate, which is in danger (as I said) of becoming a dialogue of the deaf?

And I want to offer you three possibilities, constructively. I think the communication we need, first of all, is to encourage a positive, respectful, and critical attitude towards good science. We have nothing to fear, although sometimes the results can be very challenging. Darwin’s world does usher in much questioning, which challenges insecure faith. We think of our universe. How can we possibly take it in? We are told it’s 14 billion light years across, and what do we mean by ‘across’? At least 93 billion light years — I’ve just mentioned that.

I really have no idea what this bit is about. I’m just typing the words in the order that he said them.

And it’s only in the last few seconds of the evolutionary clock that humankind has appeared. Our place, then, in this amazing and largely — still largely incomprehensible — universe, our knowledge is miniscule. It rebukes our humours. Even that of Richard Dawkins — all of us. How can we contemplate, attempt to make man the measure of all things? At best, these claims have a very hollow ring about them.

And when we turn our attention to the human body, we find a similar mystery within. The human genome project has already mapped all the genes in the human body — incidentally directed by a practicing Christian. And confronted by the incomprehensible size of the universe, out there as well as within us, there is a baffling quality about who we are, where we are, what we are, that wonder and awe are the natural reactions. How puzzling it must seem to some atheists and agnostics then, when some religious people talk with such ease about the ways of the almighty as though it were self-evident.

That is puzzling. It is one of many, many puzzling things that religious people do. Puzzling and dumb.

But a more troubling fact for all of us, because I’m wanting us to face up to hard facts, more troubling element is the evil that’s present in our world. We may be grateful inhabitants of a remarkable world in a vast universe noted for its beauty and order, but it’s one where terrible things happen, and where the helpless and the innocent are most likely to suffer. We think of environmental disasters, which can at a stroke wipe thousands off the map. Where were you when the tsunami struck the Indian Ocean on Boxing Day 2004, killing over 225,000 people? Darwin’s world seems to be a random world of chance; one of indifference to human suffering, and one where all things lead to futility.

Oh, sure, it’s God’s world when everyone’s happy, but the moment it kills a quarter of a million people it’s Darwin’s world? This is why the children fight!

At a more personal level, which of us have not had the experience of deepest tragedy, which defies logic and rationality? Many of us who minister to others as clergy and pastoral workers will know all about this. I once ministered to a dying young woman of 32, dying of cancer with three young children. And what words about the love of God make sense in the cruelty of that moment? So one part, you see, of the conversation, I’m suggesting, is to listen to that kind of painful story. Darwin’s world should not be trivialised, or softened: we have to face facts as they are. But–

“But” is an interesting word to follow “we have to face facts as they are” with.

–there’s another story that has to be heeded too, although I doubt very much that the new atheists will trouble themselves with it. Either because they lack the philosophic awareness, or perhaps, more likely, they’ve already made up their minds. And this approach raises, or asks the question, ‘how do we best account for the data all around us?’

Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist and you imagine he’s never asked himself how to account for data? You’re right, theology can be arrogant.

That is to say, we live in a universe endowed with powers and laws when apparently none of this has to be. How do we account for the capacity of the fundamental stuff of the universe to evolve not only life and conciousness, but also minds, intelligence, personality? How do we best account for the fact of the apparent objectivity and claim on us of a moral law? How do we best account for the universe’s capacity to come up with Dante, Shakespeare, Mozart? How do we best account for the universe’s capacity to give us great thinkers, philosophers and saints? How do we best account for the extraordinary ability of homo sapiens compared with other animals?

A good first step is to stop pretending it exists. We can think, fish can swim, cheetahs can run, and cockroaches are indestructible. What makes thinking so special? The answer, it turns out, is a massive misunderstanding of the anthropic principle, a really very simple idea which Carey seems to have missed so completely that he seems to have confused the idea with the question it aims to solve:

And during the last 20 years or so, a view called the anthropic principle has become fashionable, indicating that the conditions for intelligent life depends on a very narrow range of parameters, thus suggesting that intelligence is part of the structure of the universe. I found out most recently in a recent edition of Discover, there’s an interesting article by Tim Folger entitiled Science’s Alternative To An Intelligent Creator. And the article begins by noting an extraordinary fact about the universe: its basic properties are uncannily suited for life. And physicist Andre Linday puts it, we have a lot of really, really strange coincidences. And all of these coincidences are such that they make life possible. Too many coincidences, however, implies a plot. And Folger’s article shows that if the numerical values of the universe, from the speed of light to the strength of gravity, were even slightly different, there would be no universe, and no life.

And recently scientists have discovered that most of the matter and energy in the universe is made up of so-called ‘dark matter’, and ‘dark energy’. And it turns out that the quantity of dark energy seems to be precisely calibrated to make possible not only our universe, but observers like us who can comprehend the universe. Even Stephen Veinberg, the Nobel laureate, in physics, and actually an outspoken atheist, remarks, ‘this fine-tuning, that seems to be extreme far beyond what you could imagine just having to accept as a mere accident,” and the physicist Freeman Dyson draws the appropriate conclusion from the scientific evidence: he says the universe in some sense knew we were coming. Now, Folger admits in that article that this line of reasoning makes a number of scientists very uncomfortable. He says physicists don’t like coincidences. They like even less the notion that life is somehow central to the universe, and yet recent discoveries are forcing them to confront that very idea. So this is an argument worth taking seriously because it challenges the assumption that’s been around for at least two centuries that man does not occupy a privileged position in the universe, and now, according to the anthropic principle, it seems that he does.

Got all that? Excellent. Did you at any point notice the actual anthropic principle creeping in? I certainly didn’t.

Believers would argue that it does seem to be a lot to swallow, that from absolute chaos, moral confusion, chance and futility, has emerged intelligence, moral awareness, and beauty. Well, we have to think about that, that part of the conversation.

In a recent book by Professor Keith Ward, a book I commend to you, called The Big Questions in Science and Religion, I think he speaks for many of us when he says evolution is wholly compatible with belief in creation, even in a strictly neo-Darwinian form.

Yes: it predicts it.

I think there’s another conversation we need to open up, and there’s a conversation about the role, or the usefulness, of religion. Have you picked up in the press recently that shortly billboards are going to appear from London to Washington saying, ‘There’s probably no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.’

This is at about 36′30″ in the video in case you want to cut it out and play the quote repeatedly and out of context. I mean, I don’t really approve of quote-mining, but fair’s fair.

Another Humanist group in the States are mounting a similar campaign, which goes something like this — well, it goes exactly like this: ‘Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness’ sake.’ Now, the inference from both campaigns is that actually, religion makes us pretty miserable; that religion is bad for human flourishing. They are diseased, and atrophied vestiges of human life, and the sooner we get rid of them, the better. They make us miserable; they do little good. For Dawkins, Roman Catholicism is a virulent virus–

That’s the worst kind of virus!

–that should be erradicated as doing great harm to young people, and even Anglicanism, from which he emerged, incidencally, is but a milder form of the same disease. Hitchens, as I’ve already mentioned, has a more aggressive approach to religion, which ranges from the very crude to the most opinionated, and I have to say that the polemical language of such people reminds me of the Chinese proverb ‘do not use a hatchet to remove a fly from your friend’s head.’ In other words, a gentler approach will open up a conversation. So, a reasonable, a careful conversation is needed for us to overcome the infantile and trivial way matters of ethical behaviour are being addressed today.

To those who believe that religion is regressive, the question has to be put: then why is religion, and particularly Christianity, so active socially in the world, and in society, and why is it that its contribution to social capital is so highly regarded and applauded?

Is it because the people doing the applauding are overwhelmingly religious themselves? I might provide a metaphor for what they are doing there, but I try not to use the quite horrible phrase ‘circle-jerk’.

Roy Hattersley, and I want to quote him, wrote in the Guardian, 18 months ago, in his view, that ‘most believers are better human beings than atheists’. And reluctantly, he acknowledges that unbelievers are less likely to care for the poor, and spend time with outcasts of society.

They’re also less likely to kill you, by a quite preposterous margin. There’s some truth to the saying that there are no atheists in foxholes: it’s a reflection on how much harder it is to talk us into murdering the inconvenient.

And he writes these words which I put on the screen, “Good works, John Wesley insisted, are no guarantee [of] a place in heaven. But they are most likely to be performed by people who believe that heaven exists.” Now those are [Hattersley's] words, and he’s not known as a practicing Christian.

In fact, he’s an atheist. Although in this case not one that I agree with (since we’re allowed to think for ourselves).

Now this candid admission is remarkable, and it shouldn’t detract from the fact, and I want to make this very clear, and to be heeded, that a large number of Humanists, agnostics and atheists are also good people who seek to create a better world.

That’s mighty big of you, Archbishop Holier-Than-Thou.

My argument is not polemical.

I think we shall be the judge of that, Lord Believers Are Better Human Beings Than Atheists.

It is to say that those who want to erradicate the world of faiths have to percieve them as they really are, and recognise the tremendous contribution they are making to the world. But does religion make a personal difference to people? Well, let me go back to professor Keith Ward, in a different book, and a book which is also a fairly recent one, called Is Religion Dangerous?, and he says emphatically that religion does make a personal difference. He cites a survey carried out in the States by the Pew Foundation that shows that spiritually committed people are twice as likely to be very happy than the least religiously committed person. Now we can take this even further: church attendance improves health. Now what about having that as a campaign outside some of the churches?

You’ve got churches; try it. See if I report you to the ASA. Go on.

Church attendance improves health. On both sides of the Atlantic, studies have shown that this is to be the case.

Here is how that study would go: get two groups of people, one which attends church and one which does not. Take half of each group and mix them, to make two new groups with equal numbers of church attenders and church non-attenders. Assess their health. Send one to church and bar the other from any church for a few months or a year or whatever. Then assess their health again. The assessors should not know which group is which. Compare the results critically. Has this ever been done? Not to my knowledge, although it probably is true that churchgoers are, on average, healthier than the general population for other reasons (or at least, a sample of the general population of equivalent age: church attenders tend to be getting on a bit these days, so possibly church attendence causes old age).

The graduate of public health at Pittsburg University has established a consortium on faith and health, which concludes a study with the words “people who regularly attend religious services have been found to have lower blood pressure, less heart disease, lower rates of depression, and generally better health, than those who don’t attend.

…thus implying causation.

And when we move from personal health to the health of societies, a similar argument can be mounted: young people who are engaged in church communities or church programmes are less sexually promiscuous,

You mean, less sexually attractive. (If you don’t count to the clergy’s unwanted affections.)

less involved in drug activities, engage in less binge drinking, less likely to play truant from school, and are involved in less crime. This doesn’t make them ‘goodie-goodies’. They remain happy, ordinary teenagers.

There’s no such thing as a happy, ordinary teenager. Pick whichever adjective you like, but you can’t have both.

But their lifestyles are healthier, their life prospects more promising. And that, too, is part of the conversation we need to have with others in our society. If it is true that committed Christianity and, by the same token, it may be true of other faiths as well, leads to sound and healthier lifestyles, this is something that should lead us all to a more positive view of religion in general.

One could make the same argument for facism.

However, a final area for discussion takes up the third matter in my title: diversity. How may faith communities themselves open up deeper and more candid conversations where differences and similarities are explored? And I can report that this is work in progress, but much remains to be done. Darwin’s world reveals a creation that is as diverse as it is mysterious. Different forms of life flourish, and it is no different in human living as well. Those forms that fail to adapt, even intellectual aspects of social activity will wither, and die.

Islam has got to come face-to-face with modernity, and face up to the serious intellectual challenges that are coming its way. The shocking intellectual deficit in most Muslim countries is shown in a UN report that the scientific and intellectual output of the +300 million population of the Arab league countries is far less than that of the 6 million citizens of the state of Isreal. So I think I’m able to say with some confidence that Darwin’s great publication would not even be published in any Muslim country today.

I remember when I was on a BBC programme with Richard Dawkins last year, I said to him, ‘how many copies of your books have found their way into Egypt, and Iraq?’, and he laughed. And he said they won’t publish them. And it’s very interesting, and we could open a debate about that as well.

Although it would be a very short debate. Nobody worth listening to agrees with such bans.

Unless faiths are part of the public square, and able to meet others on equal footing, and engage in vigorous debate, they too will be pushed to the edge and die. For Christians, it may be a challenge to those of us who claim that title, to be more confident in our message, less church-centred, more open to debate, with reasonable Humanists whom, I suspect, at least the reasonable Humanists will be more open-minded than some Christians realise.

Now does this mean that diversity equals settling for uncertainty, as well as accepting that all roads lead up the same mountain? I think not. I think not. A confident message will always respect others, seek to find common goals. It doesn’t mean that we shall find agreement on all matters. That’s less important than the fact that a conversation on ultimate matters that affect us all is continuing. Well, quite recently I came across a book written by two scientists, and I, towards the end of this book found this statement which says was the scientists’ worst nightmare: “He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; and as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.” Well actually I don’t even know that that will be the case, but I want to tweak the story. I would like that scientist, as he pulls himself over the final rock, and sees that band of wise people, that he might see among them the familiar face of Charles Darwin, who has more right than most to be heralded as one of the greatest Englishmen and human beings of all time.

Your story no longer makes any sense.

a secular attack on… Christianity; an act of betrayal by the Assembly Government.

Go on. Have a guess.

Whatever you said, I really doubt you got it right. I don’t think any rational person could, even in jest, come up with something as mindlessly imbecilic as the correct answer: Tudur was referring to the decision to allow sixth-formers to opt out of collective worship sessions.

He feels personally betrayed because the state is refusing to force anyone wanting to go to university or get a decent job to sit through his church’s propaganda. I simply cannot fathom how anyone can be so insane without becoming a serial killer. I can see how you might, if you are a total bastard, want the state to fund and mandate your proselytising. I can see how you might, if you were a bit stupid and terrifyingly right-wing, think that that was even a good thing for the state to be doing. But you surely have to be more than slightly unhinged to actually expect it to happen, don’t you?

The fact that it did happen was a throwback. An anachronism. It has been fixed, but as I’ve said many times before, once someone has something they will very, very quickly assimilate it into what they see as their fundamental human rights, even if it explicitly steps on other people’s.

Geraint Tudur is general secretary of The Union of Welsh Independent Chapels. I have no particular idea who they are, but it seems like people for some reason listen to them.

photo credit: Base on Mars

I’m going to assume you already know about the “atheist bus” campaign. I for one like it. It will get people talking, and doing so hopefully from a starting point of skepticism, which is the healthy way of doing things. But mostly I like it because the reaction to it has been comical and served to make religious people look foolish (which is pretty easy) and that always makes me smile. The funniest one I’ve put right at the end to force you to read the whole post. (I certainly can’t see how you could possibly read the end without reading the start and middle first.

For example, Theos have responded by pretending that it is in fact the best thing to happen to religious belief since the crucifixion was retconned out of the Bible. First, they donated £50. Then they started firing off soundbites almost at random, apparently in the hope that if they said something silly enough a newspaper might print it.

We’ve donated the money because we think the campaign is a brilliant way to get people thinking about God.

– Paul Woolley, Director of Theos

Fifty quid? That’ll pay for rather less than one third of one advert. That was entirely worth the bother.

Telling someone “there’s probably no God” is a bit like telling them they’ve probably remembered to lock their door. It creates the doubt that they might not have.

– Paul Woolley

That’s really quite a poor analogy, although it’s quite telling if Theos think that “skeptical but afraid of what might happen if they’re wrong” counts as belief.

The poster is very weak - where does ‘probably’ come from? Richard Dawkins doesn’t ‘probably’ believe there is no God! - and telling people to ‘Stop worrying’ is hardly going to comfort for those who are concerned about losing jobs or homes in the recession, but the posters will still prompt people to think about life’s big questions.

– Paul Woolley

That’s right, Richard Dawkins doesn’t ‘probably’ believe there is no God. Richard Dawkins believes there is probably no God. How can you not understand what adverbs are for?

Let’s leave aside the adverts’ basic proposition, “There’s probably no God”. Where did that “probably” come from? It doesn’t suggest the sales staff is overly confident about its product. If my pilot told me “This flight to Paris probably won’t crash,” I’d think about taking the train.

– Nick Spencer, Director of Studies, Theos

Like (seemingly) almost all religious people, they don’t get the point of this. Atheism isn’t about believing there is no god, it’s about not believing that there is. (Apparently this adverb problem is common in Theos.) It’s about not accepting patent nonsense for which there is not one shred of evidence. It’s about thinking about whether or not there is a god rather than believing just for the sake of it. It just so happens that everyone who does so comes to the conclusion that God is just a made-up person. (That link is what YouTube was like in 1996.) That’s the nature of correct answers.

And let’s leave aside the advice, “Now stop worrying and enjoy your life”. You would have to go a long way to find a slogan less suited to our New Year, recession-looming, mass-unemployment gloom.

– Nick Spencer

I don’t think “leave aside” means what Nick Spencer thinks it means. He’s right though: what people need in the midst of recession-looming, mass-unemployment gloom is a book full of contradictory and insane rules which must be followed to the mistranslated letter on pain of unimaginably awful everlasting torture.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking “who cares what Theos think? Get to the point! Tell me what eminent British philosopher Bill Oddie thinks!” Okay. But you’re crazy.

What they are doing is dangerous. In doing something like that they’re speaking straight to extremists. I’d like to know how they sleep the night after one of those buses gets blown up. I’ve put that point to their head office and you know what she said? That’s why they put the word ‘probably’ in. It’s pathetic.

That is a danger.

The problem is that they’ve aligned themselves with Richard Dawkins. I would happily design dozens of alternative slogans for them. There are so many good things that they could advertise and instead they’ve chosen to go with Dawkins.

Yeah, I hates them ‘militant atheists’ who constantly go on about how there’s probably no god and how they reckon, on balance, that the Bible is more than likely fiction. They’re fundamentalists. Why can’t they advertise something good, like the West Wing box set, or innocent smoothies?

Interlude: 10 Jokes About Atheist Buses: #

1. Atheist buses don’t go anywhere when they die.
2. Christian traindrivers have warned that atheist buses might go off the rails.
3. Why did the bus turn atheist? Because it had a breakdown.
4. English buses let people know there is no god. Then atheists hire advertising space on them.
5. The Atheist Bus is a direct response to the Christian Bandwagon.
6. Why did the atheist cross the road? Because it was a bus.
7. The Atheist Bus was built by a freak tornado in a junkyard.
8. Atheist Buses don’t believe in guidance from above, except sat-nav.
9. Where did Richard Dawkins install his graphics card? The atheist bus.
10. Atheist buses come in threes. Christian buses also come in threes, but they’re all aspects of the same bushead.

Number four is a rephrasing of a Charlie Brooker line. The rest are mine. Any more, if you have them, in the comments.

The best reaction this campaign has sparked is the one from Christian Voice, who have, presumably on purpose, complained to the Advertising Standards Authority, saying

There is plenty of evidence for God, from peoples’ personal experience, to the complexity, interdependence, beauty and design of the natural world. But there is scant evidence on the other side, so I think the advertisers are really going to struggle to show their claim is not an exaggeration or inaccurate, as the ASA code puts it.

Bendy-buses, like atheism, are a danger to the public at large.

I’ve sought advice from some of our key people here, but I’m afraid all I’ve got out of them so far is peals of laughter. I am sure that Stephen Green really does think there is a great deal of evidence for a God (though presumably only the one that he believes in), but I pity the ASA if they are going to be expected to rule on the probability of God’s existence.

Mostly it is about the Islamic world and the culture and people thereof rather than Islam itself (the Islamic people seem uniquely incapable of distinguishing these concepts), but there are a couple of encouraging comments from Mohammed in holy texts that can’t have hurt (although the program doesn’t address other parts of scripture that may have the opposite effect) and an interesting idea about the Q’uran helping out. The idea is that Arabic was rolled out as a universal language to help people understand the book in its original form, and Arabic was modified to make it clearer so that people didn’t misinterpret it. That doubtless helped science, albeit by accident, by enabling easy, unambiguous communication. (It’s interesting that Christianity didn’t feel the need to make their message unambiguous — indeed, until recently they deliberately obfuscated it by translating it into dead languages. I think they only stopped because it was too much like hard work.)

Right now the presenter, Jim Al-Khalili, is talking to a so-called “wise woman” who has a wide variety of herbal and similar remedies. I assume he’s just being polite, but It appears not to have occured to him that they might not work. To my eyes, that proves nothing at all to do with science. That could just as easily be superstition. It becomes science when you test it. It’s a blurry line when you’re talking about the early proto-science of the eighth century, but the fact that she’s still selling this stuff in the twenty-first doesn’t seem to have put him off his “Science And Islam Walking Hand In Hand” thesis. And now he is reading from a book which says epilepsy is caused by evil spirits. “Hardly scientific,” he says, “but Islam’s most tangible contribution to medicine is less in its specific remedies and more in its overarching philosophy. It is, after all, a religion whose central idea is that we should feel compassion for our fellow humans”. No, it’s just a religion. Like all religions, it contains loads of different ideas, many of which are perfectly horrid, and adherants can choose to focus on any of them that they fancy.

I know Islam has had some bad press lately, but you won’t fix that by trying to give it the credit for any and all achievements made by its followers or their subjects. Marcus du Sautoy managed to cover much of the same ground on the same channel without as far as I recall mentioning Islam. (I imagine he probably mentioned it in passing.) That should be a clue as to how important it was. Another interesting quote from Dr Bennison just now: “it was not the case [in ninth century debates] that people were expected to adhere to a particular line or adopt a particular religion. They were allowed to express their own sentiments and their own views very freely. The point was that they should do so in elegant Arabic and in good logical reasoning”. Compare and contrast that to the reaction to the cartoons of Mohammed, an arguably quite important side of Islam that the program utterly fails to mention. Where did “butcher those who insult Islam” come from? Why should I credit Islam with the former and not blame it for the latter?

This sort of thing bothers me because it kind of spoils an otherwise interesting documentary, and because if we confuse a religion with its followers then any meaningful debate is impossible. You can’t argue against an idea if that argument is seen as an attack on the people who hold that idea (or other similar ones, since the term “Islam” can cover a multitude of sins). I think that if you call a show “Science And Islam” then it should be about the relationship between science and Islam, not about the growth of science in the Islamic world (that show should clearly be called “Science of Arabia”), and as part of that I expect you to mention that the influence of Islam on science has at times been to hinder it. Granted I’ve only seen one episode, but even if that is redressed in future episodes, I shouldn’t have to watch a whole series to get balance.

The program now ends with the observation that “the first great achievment of the medieval Islamic scientists was to prove that science isn’t Islamic… Science… transcends political borders and religious affiliations”. Which is true only in the rather weak sense that science remains true no matter which parts of it you elect to ignore: science is not Islamic, and crucially, Islam is not scientific.

That’s just not on. Apart from the fact that creationism is anti-science enough without trying to trump psychology as well as biology, geology and astrophysics, this kind of thing is displacing real therapy that can actually prevent these deaths. But the hell with that — why bother preventing deaths if they can be used to promote an ideology?

An obvious question that may have entered your brain by now is “what on Earth does creationism have to do with suicide prevention?” and the answer is of course “nothing”, so a better question is “what does Chaplain Biscotti think creationism has to do with suicide prevention?”. Well. Apparently he has identified a Problem:

• In the last two years, completed suicides have escalated throughout the Air Force
• …
• The Air Force did not use spirituality as part of their suicide prevention briefing until 2005

It seems that he read that and thought that the solution was to add more spirituality. I cannot fathom how even the most religiously retarded mind could reach that conclusion from that evidence. So what’s his solution?

Dr. Rick Warren’s book, The Purpose Driven Life,  provides a powerful model for Suicide Prevention, developing leaders, and making troops combat ready and effective.

No, it provides a pack of bullshit. (I haven’t read it, but I can easily surmise it’s a load of rubbish from the fact that Rick Warren wrote it.) After that are a series of laughably inept slides that are reproduced in the Kos article so I won’t bother here. Suffice to say that atheism (specifically, humanism) is equated with selfishness and then The Dreaded Communism, to the point where Darwin is inexplicably listed as one of the leaders of the USSR. It also uses the story of Pat Tillman, an atheist (as far as we know) who was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan, to push the idea of faith in general, including faith in oneself. That’s probably basically good advice, were it not displacing real therapy and attached to the rest of this pro-Christianity propaganda.

Chaplain Biscotti is not the Crackpot of the Month. That honour falls to those in secular roles above him, who allow and promote this, who push religion both as a way of reducing suicide and in general. I’m starting with Rod Bishop who seems to have compiled the presentation that contained Biscotti’s slides. Beyond that it seems to be so systemic as to make naming names as pointless as it is impossible.

Luckily the Military Religious Freedom Foundation is suing the US Military over this. How that lawsuit will go is unclear. I have no idea what the rules are on such things, not that that has anything to do with the result of any lawsuit with religion anywhere near it.

[BPSDB]

• Large Hadron Collider ‘may destroy universe’, say stupid people (original submission)
• Department for Children, Schools and Families to ‘give up on schools’ (original submission)
• Labour to use ‘guest leaders’ (original submission)
• Halloween update; local youths ‘less frightening than usual’ (original submission)
• Book of phone numbers ‘left on doorstep’ (original submission)

(I do like my headlines-with-quotes-in.)

Next, some of the ones they didn’t. I’ll put most of them after the fold, since there are a lot of them. Also, some might be offensive if you’re easily offended. First, though, my favourite, from early to mid October:

Gordon Brown has new kitchen sink installed under anti-terrorism laws

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has had his kitchen refitted under laws brought in in the wake of the September 11th and July 7th terrorist attacks.

The refit was proposed in August, as part of a larger reorganisation of Number 10. Brown’s wife Sarah raised objections to the plans at an early stage, saying that the new system would make cooking difficult and that she didn’t like the colour. It seemed that the deadlock was unresolvable until September 17th, when the Prime Minister realised he could use existing anti-terror laws to push the installation through without first gaining his wife’s approval.

Critics have claimed that this is “a clear abuse” of the power handed to the PM’s office by these new rules. One backbench MP said that while he understood the need to have special new measures to deal with the new kind of threat faced today, the government had taken advantage of the fear to pass laws granting themselves more power than they had ever been elected to. Other recent applications of the anti-terror laws include freezing the assets of Iceland UK, resolving the double-booking of a conference room in Parliament, and the emergency resolution on Tuesday which mandated it was James’ turn to do the washing up.

Brown has insisted that neither he nor the government has abused the trust placed in them by Parliament, saying that there are “other kinds of terrorism” besides violent attacks on civilians, and that these might be said to include refusal to wash dishes or bad taste in kitchen units.

The House of Lords is expected to overturn the decision, but James Brown has said that as he’s already done the washing up, it’s too late to reverse the damage and a system must be put in place to prevent these situations from arising in the first place.

Morrisons to launch own-brand Marks and Spencer

Supermarket chain Morrisons has announced plans to launch an ‘own-brand’ version of rival Marks and Spencer’s shops. The new stores, called ‘Morris And Sons’, will build on Morrisons’ existing corporate identity, the large green ‘M’, via the addition of an ampersand and an ‘S’. They aim to capture some of Marks and Spencer’s richer market by offering similarly high-class products at slightly lower prices. The new shops are expected to be opened right next to existing Marks and Spencer stores, and look similar enough that customers may enter the wrong one by mistake if they are not paying close attention. The chairman of Morrisons said, ‘this is my M&S.’

While the move has been praised by the Monopolies Commission, who have long felt that Marks and Spencer currently have an unfair dominance for the market of Marks and Spencer products, critics have complained that the culture of supermarket own-brand imitations has gone too far this time. One lawyer has even condemned the move as ‘blatant passing off’, but representatives of Marks and Spencer maintain that their customers are not about to desert the brand for a competitor. Officials have warned that if own-brand Marks and Spencers become commonplace then the term ‘M&S’ could become generic, like Xerox, Hoover or Sellotape, and simply be a word that any company could use to describe produce which is not as posh as it thinks it is. Marks and Spencer are reportedly working on an advert for this eventuality which begins ‘this is not just M&S chicken…’

Some people have expressed fears that if the plans are allowed to go ahead then high streets may consist of nothing other than Tesco versions of popular chains as early as 2015. Experts insist that there is no evidence that this will happen, pointing to America as an example, where a chain of ‘Frankie & Johnnie McDonald’s Steakhouse’ restaurants has been operating for years without incident.

‘Shit’ to be upgraded to Class B swear-word.

After massive public outrage at increasing use of the word ’shit’, often by children as young as eight, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith is set to announce plans to upgrade it to a class B swear-word. In her speech, Smith is expected to criticise the current cursing classifications as “archaic”, citing such oddities as thumb biting, seen in Shakespeare but rare in modern Britain and still considered a class C curse in the eyes of the law, and the fact that ‘punani’ is still not listed on the legislation.

There are also plans to crack down on rogue cursers who supplant their swear-words by ‘cutting’ them using harmless letters (producing variants like the increasingly popular ‘feck’), or more dangerous punctuation marks or characters from Wingdings or Zapf Dingbats.

There is growing concern among parents that ’shit’, while not particularly offensive in its own right, may lead on to the use of “harder” curses such as ‘fuck’ or the middle finger. Some are afriad that their children may experiment with dangerous cocktails of powerful swear-words such as ’sheep-shagging motherfucking cunt’. However, others have argued that making ’shit’ less acceptable will do nothing but increase its strength. “The whole appeal of swearing is that it’s a taboo,” said one representative. “If you try to regulate it, that will only encourage people. Surely we all remember what happened whet the government tried to classify ‘knob’ as a class C swear-word. Use sky-rocketed and we lost a generation of stand-up comedians. Since it was declassified and isn’t considered offensive any more, nobody bothers to say it much.” This point is addressed in the text of the Home Secretary’s statement, citing the drop in use of the word ‘nigger’ as a success story for the legislation.

Civil rights campaigners have also slammed the plans, claiming that the right to free speech means that citizens can use any words they like and in any order, provided that it is not libellous or fraudulent.

Parliament has not yet unveiled plans to close the loophole which allows elaborate innuendo, but a certain member is expected to push through such a crackdown in the near future.

(alternate, more offensive headline: ‘Cunt’ to be upgraded to ‘B-Word’.)

Britain to Jacqui Smith: “We were being sarcastic” (probably makes no sense now)

London to host 2012 Olympics in Second Life

The chair of the London 2012 Organising Committee Sebastian Coe, has announced that the stadium where most events will take place is being built inside the Second Life computer game world. The game world has previously hosted conferences and meetings and some real-world companies have offices there. However, this is the first time a major public sporting event has been held entirely within a virtual universe. The virtual stadium will be able to seat 80,000 spectator ‘avatars’, and of course those without Second Life characters will be able to watch on TV. Second Life was chosen over the game world of World of Warcraft to prevent athletes from using performance-enhancing potions such as Swiftness.

London Mayor Boris Johnson hailed the plans as innovative, and said they show that Britain and London are leading the world in embracing the future and online culture, but fellow Conservative Ann Widdecombe said in her Daily Express column that it was a stunt, “a shameless failure to live up to Britain’s promise when we bid for the games, and to just fob the IOC and the world off with something cheaper instead”. Her party leader David Cameron dismissed this opinion, however. Speaking on Webcameron, he said that the modern Conservative Party was excited by the new possibilities made open by the technology, and said that his Second Life avatar, Secameron, had already reserved a seat. Johnson made the speech from a podium outside his Second Life HQ. His avatar is a tall, confident man in a business suit, with neat, black hair in a left parting and a large and conspicuous pair of blue horns which he hasn’t worked out how to delete.

Many athletes have objected to the plans, saying that their years of training will be useless in Second Life, but Coe said in an interview that the Internet was the future, and that that might mean traditional skills become obsolete. Johnson answered the criticism less deftly, saying “well, maybe you should have learned to do something more useful than throwing a heavy frisbee a long way”. His office later clarified the remark in a press release, but former discus champion Carl Myerscough whose avatar attended the event later said “I would have pelted him with eggs if I knew what button did that”.

McCain and Palin to host Countdown

John McCain and Sarah Palin, the failed Republican contendors for the White House, have been signed to present the next series of Countdown, say sources close to the programme. “After Des O’Connor and Carol Vorderman quit the show, we’d been hunting for a new pair to replace them. We needed an older man and a woman about Carol’s age who our viewers would find attractive but not intimidatingly so. And they should know each other and have some chemistry. After months of auditions, we turned on the TV and were shocked to see the perfect pair running for election.”

McCain released a statement confirming the leak, saying “When I first got the offer, I thought it was for MSNBC’s Countdown, currently hosted by Keith Olbermann. It seemed like a good opportunity to tone down the network’s rampant liberal bias. Then they flew me to a state called ‘Yorkshire’ for the audition and I realised my mistake.”

Reporters were also shown a copy of the tape from the audition. McCain is said to have not really grasped what the show was about or who it was aimed at, and viewers responded well to that, because it represented strong continuity. Palin performed well in the letters game, and better than expected in the numbers. In the first round she failed to make the target of 270, but by the end of the show she had found her form. Faced with a 75, a 10, a 4, two 7s and a 1, and a target of 689, she drew a complex-looking diagram on the board made up mostly of numbers, arrows, and arithmetical operator symbols, and explained, “Well, it’s like my momma always said, when you have the sevens, and a four, and you see what you do with them and you multiply… you multiply the numbers, and you pray, and all of them just really come together beautifully so that when you get down to it it’s really a matter of whether you want to make 689 or not.” Then she cocked her head to one side and squinted at the audience to see whether they had understood. 80% of the audience found this ‘not at all different’ to Carol’s performance.

Producers had hoped to test McCain’s ability to handle a Crucial Countdown Conundrum, but one contestant had ammassed a large lead in the early stages of the contest and there was never really any chance that it would go down to the wire.

Vatican City on international watch list

A spokesperson for the Foreign Office was forced to admit last night that the Vatican City had for some time been the subject of international security amid rising fears of religiously-motivated terrorism.

‘We have a number of criteria for these decisions,’ he said, ‘and the Vatican City meets many of them. It is a real cause for concern.’ He went on to point out that only people who subscribe to the national religion - Catholicism - are allowed to work in the Vatican City. Homosexuals are not permitted to work there either. ‘This is not what we can reasonably call a free or democratic nation. It has no education or healthcare infrastructure, and has some very strange laws about celibacy.’

There are also fears that the state may be a harbour for fascism: the Vatican was declared an independent nation in 1929 by the Lateran treaty, signed into law by Benito Mussolini, and recently appointed a former member of the Hitler Youth its leader in a secret vote between only a small number of men. The Vatican has never participated in any kind of international dialogue, and sources say that any official negotiation between it and the United States may be unconstitutional. Sympathisers with the Vatican are barred by law from becoming UK royalty.

It was also confirmed that the country has thousands of cells of ‘devoted followers’ scattered around the world, including in the United Kingdom, however reporters were assured that neither the UK or the US is planning an invasion.

More worryingly, there are reports that Tony Blair has recently been associated with the ‘rogue state’.

Woolworths now worth less than wool.

Man who cut off own hand to free himself ‘would have been okay anyway’

Following a car accident on a country lane, keen mountainclimber Liam Richards and nephew John, 19, became trapped in their vehicle on Tuesday. With no signal on his mobile phone and unable to escape the vehicle, Richards eventually resorted to using his penknife to amputate has own left hand, which was pinned between two crushed panels. ‘I’d seen people on TV who’d done it, and I thought, “I could do that.”‘ He then ran to the nearest telephone box to raise the alarm. According to Dave Moore, the first paramedic who attended the scene, ‘Mr Richards was incredibly brave. I don’t know how many other people could have done what he did,’ but added ‘of course, a local woman had seen the accident and alerted us already, so he would have been fine anyway. Still though, wow.’

‘I saw his car swerve off the road and hit the tree from my kitchen. Straight away I dialled 999 and told them to come right away,’ said local Margaret Houseman. ‘I tried to get his attention, but then I saw him cutting off his arm and I had to sit down for a bit. I couldn’t speak. I didn’t know any first aid anyway.’ Paramedics say that Mr Richards’ hand was not badly damaged, but due to the way he had severed it, it would not be possible to reattach it.

Also in the car was John Richards, who was instantly killed upon impact. Peers at his school have described him as ‘annoying’, and ‘not one of the more popular boys’. His teachers said that he ‘rarely paid attention’ and ‘consistently underachieved’. The car had been travelling from a nearby town after a shopping trip, an activity the family say the pair ‘did not particularly enjoy’. Richards said they hadn’t bought anything special that day, ‘just some clothes and stuff.’

Asked about the need for such trees to be removed from the sides of rural roads to prevent such events in the future, John’s mother, Sylvia, issued a statement saying ‘you can’t save everybody all of the time. Obviously we’re all shocked by John’s tragic death, but overprotecting everyone will not help in the long run.’

The car was a 1996 Nissan Micra, which Richards described as ‘basically okay’ and ‘easily replaceable’.

Wikipedia user sets new world record time

Wikipedia user “90.196.252.184″ is celebrating today after breaking the men’s world record for updating Wikipedia after a major world event.

The Wikipedia page “100 metres” was updated to reflect Usain Bolt’s historic race only 9.69 seconds after the race ended. The previous record was set earlier in the year on July 7th when user CoolKid1993 updated the encyclopaedia to reflect Hillary Clinton’s withdrawal from the Democratic nomination race only 9.74 seconds after her sentence ended.

90.196.252.184 has so far been unavailable for comment, but a statement issued on his User:Talk page simply curses himself for failing to log-on to the website and claim the record under his preferred name.

The record has been ratified by Wikipedia’s controllers, however an appeal has been launched by user 218.186.13.2, who claims that 90.196.252.184’s time should be disregarded because he misspelt “Beijing” in the record table halfway down the article. CoolKid1993 has refused to endorse or oppose the appeal, standing by his initial statement that he always knew the record would be broken and is excited at the talent coming up through the Wikipedia registration page.

Nobody has yet bothered to set a women’s record.

Gordon Brown spending all day replying to e-petitions

Over the last year, in an attempt to connect with younger voters, the Prime Minister’s office has set up a comprehensive interactive website, as well a Twitter feed and pages on Facebook and Flickr. A source inside 10 Downing Street has told reporters that Gordon Brown now spends ‘most of his time’ tending to these services and profiles.

“It took a while for him to get to grips with all the services, but once he did it was impossible to get him off them. We had hoped that other staff would keep them up to date, but Gordon insisted on doing it himself. Now he spends most afternoons responding to e-petitions.”

The Government has not officially responded to this, although the Downing Street Twitter profile did post an update to explain that the Prime Minister felt it was important to connect with the population as directly as possible. Some, however, have expressed concern that it may be his way of hiding from reality. “Brown has 72 friends on the Downing Street Facebook page, which is far more than he has in Parliament. That said, many of them are clearly gimmick accounts. We know for a fact that he’s never actually met anyone called Jesus H Christ.” Brown’s Facebook page lists him as “in a special relationship”.

There have also been accusations that the new digital services are a waste of money. The amount of updates on the sites in total is thought to be a major drain on government time, especially since most of the Twitter updates are 135-140 characters long, suggesting that Brown spends several minutes crafting each one.

According to a note posted on the Downing Street Blog, the blame for this situation rests firmly with the media, whose incessant nagging two years ago forced all politicians to purchase iPods to fill with music which was more popular than them.

US National Debt mysteriously ‘rolls round’ to zero

At 2:41 yesterday afternoon, panic gripped the White House as the National Debt reached nine trillion, nine hundred and ninety-nine billion, nine hundred and ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars for the first time in the nation’s history. Officials immediately set about drawing up a raft of proposals to fix the problem, including tax increases, spending cuts and the invasion of Switzerland, but at 3:07 a junior staffer working in Times Square phoned and pointed out that actually the national debt stood at only a few hundred dollars, one of the lowest on Earth.

At first President Bush did not believe the news, and immediately flew out to New York to check the clock for himself. Some aides attempted to explain that the debt could be more accurately checked within the White House, but Bush insisted that he liked to get his information the same way the American People get theirs. One staff member is reported to have insisted that there will be plenty of time for that in February, but the President’s resolve was characteristically strong. At a press conference, he told reporters that this new era of prosperity spelled an end to the fears of foreclosure faced by millions of Americans and that his vision and the $700bn financial bailout should be credited with the reversal in the nation’s economic situation.

One journalist at the press conference asked if it was possible that the debt had “run out of digits and rolled round to zero”, to which the President responded that complex issues like the economy never have just one cause. “The design of the clock may have been a factor,” he conceded, “but it was [his] decisions and leadership that pushed it over the edge.”

Bush has promised a wave of tax cuts and spending increases in order to make sure that Americans see the benefits of the new solvency in the budget, however President-Elect Barack Obama has announced that he intends to reverse these, claiming that the reduction in debt is somehow “an illusion”. Early polling figures suggest that Obama’s popularity dropped seven points following the announcement.

Outbreak ‘could have been prevented’ by rubber tongue cleaners

The World Health Organisation has said that the cause of the recent outbreak which killed nearly a million people in the poorest parts of Africa was a tongue-borne virus which could have been prevented had these people had access to basic vital medical supplies such as toothbrushes with little rubberised tongue-cleaners on the back.

‘People don’t realise how vital these tongue-cleaners are,’ said the spokesperson. ‘They think they’re just a gimmick cooked up to sell more toothbrushes after people got wise to the whole “flexible neck” fad. But the truth is that a dirty tongue can be disastrous for your health. Remember that everything you eat goes over your tongue. In many ways, it’s simply a miracle that mankind survived this long without this technology.’

He went on to explain that he considered it ‘imperative’ to make tongue-cleaning brushes available to everyone, and has joined forces with the WWF to make this technology available to the animal kingdom. ‘Most animals have some form of tongue and yet only mankind have developed a pimpled rubber pad to clean it with. It is surely our sacred duty to provide this to our brethren in other species, before they are decimated by germs that live on the tongue and inside the cheeks, and those hard-to-reach places around the gumline.’

Fox News: Obama to end ‘pork barrel’ citing rules of Halal.

Trading halted as wasp enters London Stock Exchange

The credit crunch looks set to worsen today as news emerges that trading has been suspended on the floor of the Stock Exchange due to a wasp which has been loose above the exchange floor for the last four hours.

It is thought that the insect got into the building on the coat of a licensed broker, but authorities have yet to name a suspect. Trading had been in full force until shortly after lunchtime, at which point investor Brian Jameson “thought he heard something”. At first he suspected some kind of electrical fault, but ruled that out when he noticed the sound was moving.

When traders started to realise that there was a wasp in the room, they started to head for the exits, wary of being stung on the trading floor. This has lead to a situation known in financial circles as “a bee market”.

Some companies are, however, benefiting from the incident: those who trade on the Internet are reporting ’significantly’ less competition, and there are reports of a single investor still on the floor, who appears to be doing quite well for himself. So far, the wasp has stayed away from him, although nobody can guarantee how long his luck might hold. This has lead to speculation by some analysts that the wasp may have been introduced deliberately in order to reduce his competition.

Authorities now say that the wasp is buzzing about behind one of the large screens in place to show current stock prices, and is impossible to access. “It would be easy if we unplugged the screen,” they admitted, “but it’s been there ages and we’re not sure where all the wires go any more. Anyway, that one guy is still using it.” At present, there is no way to know how long the danger may last, or how much it could affect the value of British companies.

“At Least We’re Not Falling Into The Sea”, says North (also probably no longer makes sense)

Doctor, Liverpool fail to regenerate

Common maths errors “should be accepted”

According to an article in the Times Higher Education Supplement by Ken Smith, Professor of Criminology at Bucks New University, university lecturers should stop correcting the most common mathematical errors in students’ work and simply accept them as “variant” answers.

“Why shouldn’t 57 be a prime number?” he asks. “It looks like one, and a lot of my students think that it is. Surely that gives it as good a claim to be prime as any other number?”

Other proposals to “simplify” mathematics in his article include making 0÷0 equal to one, truncating π to four decimal places — 3.1415 — since that’s all anyone can remember, accepting “proof by example” as mathematically valid, and allowing students to “cancel the d” in calculus questions.

“I’ve seen mathematics teachers repeatedly correcting the same error in the same student’s work, and yet the problem would be solved if they simply accepted the 10 commonest errors as correct.

“Mathematics teachers are just too uptight about the subject to allow any change. Would it hurt them so much if 0.9 recurring was strictly less than one? That would seem pretty sensible to me.”

Scientists calculate formula for the perfect number of days’ detention

Scientists at the University of Westminster have calculated a scientific theory to work out how many days the government should detain a terror suspect without trial. According to Dr. Brown, the formula is D=T×(21/7)×1W, where D = number of days detention, W = number of days in a week and T = number of towers destroyed, and 21/7 is the date of the most recent attack on London.

The academics and mathematicians behind the study, commissioned by the Labour Party, say that the formula will be of use to anyone planning to detain criminals beyond the period normally allowed by law.

The scientists have stressed that the formula is only valid in Britain. Dr Blair was quick to point out that their research found that “in America, for example, imprisonment, or even torture, without trial should continue indefinitely”.

Human rights campaigners have welcomed the findings. A spokesperson for Liberty said “oh, well, if it’s maths then I guess it must be okay”.

42 Days: What do YOU think?

The 42-day detention without charge of terror suspects is a controversial measure, and it is hard to find anyone in government or the media whose opinion is not guided by an obvious vested interest. Therefore, in line with standard media practice, we have found two ordinary members of the public on opposite sides of the debate and given them both a chance to have their say here:

Mohammed Imami

I was arrested in Euston Station three months ago. I hadn’t done anything wrong. I was released without charge after 26 days, but my employers had already replaced me. My marriage had been strained to breaking point and I hadn’t been able to pay my bills. My life has been a total nightmare ever since. I cannot see any justification for the new measures.

Moyra Haynes

Well, as a woman who was raped by a man released without charge from police custody 39 days earlier, I have to say I’m in favour of the measures. I only wish we’d had them sooner. It turned out that my attacker hadn’t actually committed the crime he’d been arrested for, but that’s the power of these new measures — they still would have protected me.

Official Chinese Olympic report mentions only events China won

Following the discovery that the fireworks seen around the world at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics were computer generated, and the replacement of a singer Yang Peiyi with a more photogenic mime, details have begun to emerge of other alterations the Chinese have made to the Olympic Games’ image.

The official website so far makes no mention of the swimming events in which Chinese athletes managed only bronze and silver medals, and bloggers in Beijing are reporting that they can’t find the stadium anywhere in the city, leading to speculation that a more attractive city, possibly in Korea, has been used as a stand-in.

One intrepid Olympic correspondent has noted that only one of the Chinese synchronised diving team is ever available for interviews, and that his dressing room contains a fifteen metre high mirror.

Judge decides Mosely basement romp “not wrong”

Josef Fritzl seeking to hire same lawyer.

Inflatable church blows away, converts four (This was the week that two unrelated inflatables were in the news. I just related them.)

An inflatable church designed for Italian beachgoers became detached from its moorings last week and blew into a town centre. Three men and a woman having lunch in a local cafe at the time were struck by the blow-up house of God and were instantly converted to Roman Catholicism.

One of the victims said, “I was having a coffee outside, when suddenly I felt something large and rubbery brush past the back of my head. I was filled with this amazing feeling of love, and I suddenly felt that somehow everything was going to be alright.”

Not all of the group were happy about the conversion, however. One was previously a non-practicing Christian, and did not notice her conversion for two days, when she saw the Pope on television and couldn’t shake the feeling that his word was infallible. Theologians diagnosed her with Catholicism the following day. Since then she has read Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion in its entirety twice, but failed to beat her condition. “It’s been dreadful,” said another. “I was quite happy as an agnostic, but since becoming a Catholic I’ve been racked with guilt and had difficulty reconciling much of my knowledge with my new faith.”

Also struck by the floating house of worship was Abu Mohammed Ahmed, then a devout Muslim. He is considering suing the operators of the inflatable church, claiming that since his conversion he has been shunned by his family for apostasy and finds it difficult fitting in to his new church. He has, however, found that he quite likes pork, previously forbidden to him since pigs are considered unclean in Islam.

Tesco Store Sign Changes Again

A drive by the Plain English Campaign (PEC) to change signs in Tesco stores has caused mass confusion. The offending signs originally read “10 items or less”, but the PEC complained that “less” should only be used to modify mass nouns. Their proposed alternative, “10 items or fewer”, was deemed ‘too stilted’ by the store’s managers and “no more than 10 items” sounded ‘too negative’. A new sign was eventually unveiled that read “up to 10 items”, but this soon came under fire from the public, who no longer knew if they were allowed exactly ten items.

Tesco rejected a proposal from the UK Mathematics Trust to solve this problem using signs that read “n items, where 0 < n < 10″, when a focus group admitted it had them entirely stumped. The phrasing “10 items or not as many items as that” was rejected also, as was “No more items than you have fingers” as it was feared that the latter might offend the disabled, and nobody was sure if thumbs counted anyway.

In an interview with the BBC, a spokesperson for the Plain English Campaign was asked if it was true that there had actually been less than 5 complaints about the original signs. “I’m sorry,” was the response, “but I don’t know what you mean,” and he kept up this ridiculous charade until the interviewer gave an audible sigh and asked if fewer than 5 people had complained. The spokesperson then admitted that actually nobody at all had complained.

The signs currently read “zero, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, or 10 items”, and so far nobody has complained except for the man who makes the signs and two shoppers in Cambridge who were offended by the use of the so-called ‘Oxford comma’. Tesco management have admitted they neither know nor care what that means.

It is thought that all of this has cost Tesco just fewer than £2 million.