There’s also a page of submitted prayers, so we can find out what Anglicans feel is worthy of God’s time but not theirs. (To be fair, God has more.) There’s also a rather worrying amount of personally identifiable information in these prayers, for example at least one full name alongside a description of the person’s problems, which seems pretty inappropriate to me.

I pray for Andrew – that he may find meaning and purpose in his life, and peace which passes all understanding.

The first thing that struck me as odd was that people pray in text-speak.

i love you jesus
keep me surrounded you
fill me wz ur holy spirit
let me know about you -ur ways -ur service
i need u
i love you jesus

It just seems rude to me. There’s even some all in capitals, as if that will help God hear it.

we pray for simon our vicar on his move. please set us the righr peauson to be our right vicar.

I do get annoyed when I mean to type “R” but instead type “AU”.

World peace is a common theme:

O God almighty I pray for all the countries with wars to settle.

Dear god,

please stop the wars from all around the world and let there be peace. please keep my family and my pets safe.

Dear God

Thank you for life and other people so i can make friends.And thank you for famlies if we didn’t have them i don’t know what will happen and please end war

Amen

Please stop all wars

dear god
please put a end to war
please make us give up somthing for lent
thankyou for making me

I think the biggest prayer was this one, although it is at least helpfully divided up into four sub-tasks for God’s convenience:

Our Lord in Heaven.
Please:
1- Give Peace for all the world.
2- Give health for all sick people.
3- Give work for all jobless people.
4- Let us love you, because you loved us first.

This is how democracy works in the Information Age. I don’t know if God is going to get away with not ending all wars now.

I thought this one especially sweet:

Dear God

Thank you for food. Thank you for animals. Thank you for birds that sing beautifully. I really appreciate all you have given us .

Amen

It reads like they just bumped into God in the office or whatever and it occurred to them they never really said thankyou properly. “Look, God, mate, I know I don’t tell you often but I thought you should know, we all really appreciate the way you created the universe like that. I mean, we use it all the time. Seriously, good work on that one.”

dear lord
sorry for leaving litter on your beautiful earth.

But then I read that someone’s released the Bible on Xbox Live Arcade. It occurs to me that the events of the Old Testament would make for a violent, sex-crazed, prostitute-laden videogame that nobody could criticise. You could play as the Angel of Death, and storm down Egyptian streets slaying babies, or you could, well, drive around killing prostitutes. If the indiscriminate killing in Grand Theft Auto is too offensive, why not make a game based on Deuteronomy 2:33-34, where you run around a city killing everybody? A lot of people would be upset at this game, but I don’t see how they could complain because most of them are big fans of the book.

The New Testament game would be less fun, but easier because you’d get two lives.

Also the real-time-strategy element would probably be a bit unbalanced if all you have to do is march around the city a few times playing horns and the whole place falls down. What Biblical stories would make good criticism-proof videogames?

The pragmatic necessity, though, doesn’t extend to any old nonsense. This week, there have been two weird uses of this law. The first was Tim Nicholson, who won a judgement about unfair dismissal after he was sacked for hectoring his company about green issues.

His solicitor, Shah Qureshi, said: “Essentially what the judgment says is that a belief in man-made climate change and the alleged resulting moral imperative is capable of being a philosophical belief and is therefore protected by the 2003 religion or belief regulations.”

This was best summed up, I think, by David Mitchell on the News Quiz, who essentially said that it’s good these ideas get respect but that it’s bad that the way they do so is to be more like religions. He said that arbitrary religious reckonings musn’t be questioned but scientific facts backed by evidence are fair game and that that was the wrong way around.

More recently,

Alan Power, a trainer with Greater Manchester Police, will rely on a previous judgment that found his belief in mediums who contact the dead is akin to a religious or philosophical conviction. In an unpublished judgement in Mr Power’s favour seen by The Independent, the employment specialist Judge Peter Russell said that psychic beliefs are capable of being religious beliefs for the purpose of the Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations 2003.

If you need convincing that this is perverse, read this:

Judge Peter Russell… said: “I am satisfied that the claimant’s beliefs that there is life after death and that the dead can be contacted through mediums are worthy of respect in a democratic society”

Really? I would say they’re worthy of mockery, and I’d further say that they’re a very good reason to sack him if

Mr Power told the court that he had a belief in psychics and their “usefulness in police investigations”.

According to a blog,

The judge said that a later hearing would have to establish whether Power was ‘dismissed for the possession of religious or philosophical beliefs or for his alleged inappropriate foisting of his beliefs on others’.

But then, according to the Times,

Mr Power, who worked for Greater Manchester Police for three weeks in October last year, was sacked over his work with neighbouring police forces and his “current work in the psychic field”, the tribunal heard.

If Power wins the second hearing then this would effectively shepherdus into the fictional world of Rob Grant’s Incompetence. This is a book set in a dystopian future in which it is illegal to discriminate on the grounds of incompetence, and therefore everyone does the job they want and most of them are terrible at it.

This is part of the wider problem of religion: it demands that we respect ideas that range from slightly odd to downright idiotic, but doesn’t properly define which ones, so any attempt to mandate that respect is doomed. You can’t build an internally consistent set of rules if you have to accommodate the mandatory respect of a handful of strange beliefs. You end up having to respect any belief regardless of its merit and that leads to people being killed by elevators with buttons wired up for floors that don’t exist.

It should be illegal to fire someone because they believe in man-made climate change because that’s sensible. It should be legal to fire someone because they believe in psychic mediums because that’s stupid. Surely we have a law for that? Surely that’s what the ‘unfair dismissal’ means?

I mean, I don’t like it in principle because I think if people are going to believe something then it should be true. (And for the record, anyone who falls for Mormonism or Scientology is a fully levelled-up imbecile, with a million inexperience points and the Shield of Ignorance card.) I also object to the relativist attitude the current culture promotes. Lastly, I object to anyone identifying themselves as ‘Catholic’ because that’s an endorsement of Pope Batshit-Mental XVI, and more generally a large number of believers gives any religion’s lunatic fringe a dangerous illusion of credibility. And these are all fine objections in principle, but in practice, in reality, for the purposes of day-to-day thinking, I just find it weird.

I think I’ve essentially been an atheist ever since it occurred to me to think about religion. For years since then I’ve surrounded myself with young, middle-class, liberal science students and their ilk, so now when I meet someone I assume they’re an atheist in the same way I assume they like cake: so completely have I accepted that there aren’t any gods that it simply wouldn’t occur to me that anyone might disagree. I mean, I know religious people exist outside of churches and other countries and the Internet, but only in the same way that I know a lot of people are conservatives and I know the weekend isn’t an infinite time-bank in which I can catch up with any ridiculous amount of work I care to ignore during the week: I can remember that these things are true but they’re kind of not programmed into my internal model of the world. You know, like general relativity.

But then… there are a couple of my friends who are theists, and every so often I see a Facebook update or something* that casually mentions God or Jesus or Allah vel cetera as if it’s a real person and it just weirds me out. For one thing, I don’t know what to do when I’m invited to thank God for some meaningless turn of fortune. Anything honest seems impolite. How is that fair? They’re the one with the delusion — if anyone’s going to be in an impossible situation, surely it should be them?

In the end I just ignore them. I know if I correct them they won’t listen anyway. Although that said, I do the same thing in pub quizzes and I’ve lost out on a prize that way, so maybe I need to be more assertive. In the meantime, though, my sheepishness to correct the deluded stands me in good stead for handling the religious. Sometimes I post passive-aggressively atheist messages just to balance it out.

The feeling that it’s weird persists, though. Here, I think (in that implicit, subconscious way we do most of our low-level thinking) is a list of updates, from people I care about, to let me know what’s going on in their lives… and here’s one that also involves a fictional character that my friend genuinely believes to be real. I literally don’t know how to process that information. It’s like presenting DOS with the command “c:\make me a cup of tea”. My face just goes blank while my brain throws it the neural equivalent of an unhandled exception error and emails a crash report to Charles Darwin.

I don’t really have a point to make here about anyone other than myself. (I thought I’d wait until the end to mention that. So you’d read it.) I think I just needed to write this somewhere before it drove me crazy. I vaguely hope that any religious folk who happen across this post might understand a bit better what it’s like to be an atheist, although I suspect they might only learn what it’s like to be a socially inept geek-atheist who is procrastinating rather than write his thesis.

My question is this: is the following quote from St Thérèse the sort of thing you would want to publicise if it was your religion?

Be not afraid to tell Jesus that you love Him; even though it be without feeling, this is the way to oblige Him to help you, and carry you like a little child too feeble to walk.

Read it again, this time mentally substituting ‘your boyfriend’ for ‘Jesus’. I think that’s a little bit like something Jo Brand might say.

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 fÅ“tuses ‘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.