Apathy Sketchpad

Almost exactly a month ago (yeah, yeah), the Centre for Policy Studies published “In Bad Faith”, rallying against… well, let’s let the author, Christina Odone, explain…

The witch hunt is on. A Government obsessed with phoney egalitarianism and control freakery is aligning itself with the strident secularist lobby to threaten the future of faith schools in Britain.

I shall defer responding to this to the rather brilliantly ranty article published by Andrew Copson in the Guardian:

Few apart from than Odone can have noticed this dangerous development. Under Labour governments since 1997 more new state-funded faith schools have opened than under any other government, and there is no sign that this increase is being stemmed or about to be. Certainly no evidence for such a change of direction is presented in today’s pamphlet, a mish-mash of anecdote, selective factoids and non-sequiturs (”The schools are not divisive. Not one of the 72 British citizens convicted under the Terrorism Act of 2000 attended a faith school.”).

So what’s the problem?

[Faith schools] are out with Gordon Brown.

The Prime Minister may acknowledge that his faith is important to him. But so is his standing with the Labour party – all the more so given his record-low popularity with the voters. Gordon Brown knows that for the ‘Old Labour’ rump of the party, equally committed to secularism and comprehensive education, faith schools are anathema. Tony Blair and ‘New Labour’ were ready to ignore this constituency, but Gordon Brown cannot afford to.

It occurs to me that what people voted for in the last election was not faith schools, not Blair, nor Brown, but it was Labour. If Labour are largely against faith schools then surely Odone is accusing Brown of nothing more than keeping the promise Blair reneged on?

Here is her example of a faith school that’s good:

In contrast to the graffiti that covers the neighbouring buildings, and the litter on the streets and pavements, the Sir John Cass complex is impressively tidy and clean. Youngsters (the school is co-ed) in navy blue uniforms walk briskly but quietly in the corridors, greeting teachers with ‘Hello Sir’ or ‘Hello Miss’. When they spot the head, Haydn Evans, they fall silent to attention. It is easy to understand their awe: when one boy arrives with his tie askew, Evans, eyebrow raised, picks him up on it: ‘Where’s your uniform?’

He sounds like a dick who rules by fear to me. I mean, I’d hate to generalise just from that, but it’s hardly convincing me that faith schools are worth the rampant discrimination and segregation required to sustain them. In any case, this is a Church of England school with 60% Muslim students (just like most faith schools, I’m unwilling to bet), and yet they persist in the pointless and rather silly charade of having a little prayer that most of the students don’t believe in. If this school, with students from a broad mix of (parents’) faiths, is the best example in favour of faith schools you can find, surely that’s an argument against them? At least it’s an argument against the aribtrary suspension of discrimination laws for their special case?

After this she bangs on for a while about the good results faith schools get in league tables. Now I don’t know a lot about schools, but I do know a bit about science. I know that you can’t just say they’re good because “they account for a third of all primary schools but make up almost two-thirds of the top 209 primaries”. That could mean anything. It could mean that selection works. It could mean they’re largely in areas where people get good results. You have to compare them with a matched control group, not just every other school. That’s a meaningless comparison.

In any case, to be frank I’d not be at all surprised if faith schools gave good exam results. I just think that those good exam results will be on the CVs of fucked up children. That, to me, isn’t progress. I for one would rather my children, should I ever have any, grew up to be well-balanced people with poor grades than unlikeable conservative nerds. Obviously I’m exaggerating, but it’s the children of ultra-religious people who need secular education most, and saying “if you don’t like it, pick another school” is like saying “let’s legalise murder, and if you don’t like it, don’t kill anyone”: it very much misses the point. Faith schools are a Catch-22: the people who want them are the people it is most important shouldn’t get them.

She also makes an appeal to populatity, saying

Among Christian parents, faith schools are so popular that they are allegedly pushing their children into late baptisms to secure places at these schools. Meanwhile, parents who were turned away from over-subscribed faith schools refuse to accept the alternative: about 70,000 appeals are launched each year.

But this is also misleading: the public in general are against faith schools. Parents want their kids to go to good schools. They don’t care what religion that school is.

In chapter two, Odone makes a poor attempt to address the idea that selection may be responsible for the better results:

Critics maintain that faith schools use the admissions procedure to usher in a better-off intake. As evidence, they point to the schools’ under-representation of children on Free School Meals (FSM)…

But the National Audit Office warns that FSM do not necessarily serve as the best proxy for poor income. Its reservations were corroborated by research carried out last year for the Centre for the Economics of Education.

Fair enough perhaps, but let’s not forget you’re happy to use league tables against a hopelessly unmatched control as a proxy for efficacy. Besides, she’s in favour of selection:

To the Government, as Ed Balls’s attack revealed, a request for a marriage certificate as part of an application form is an ignominious attempt to flush out single mothers. To the Orthodox Jewish school, it is the only way to verify that both parents are born Jews.

Yes, but here in Britain we don’t stand for that kind of shit. Born Jews? That’s not “maintaining the religious ethos of the school”, that’s racism. I’d think Jews, of all people, would know better than that. She lists other, similar examples, which yes, do ensure that the school’s religious makeup is controlled, but plainly also act as proxies for performance selection.

Chapter four (chapter three saying nothing of any consequence) again opens with what Odone wrongly considers a lovely story about what she hopefully-wrongly perceives to be one of the better faith schools. Since the schools featured are her choice from the minority of ones that responded, from the minority of ones she contacted, I dismissed it out of hand. After that she starts explaining the idea that Muslim students or their parents might be offended by many aspects of what she quite wrongly describes as our “secular” state school system. These include “gym where their modesty is affronted” — believe me, at secondary school I would have liked little more than a decent affront to modesty in gym class and it really doesn’t happen — and “the school trip to a farm where they might come into contact with a pig” — which did happen. It was a Gloucester Old Spot. It wasn’t scary or offensive in the least. Of course, I’m not a Muslim, but screw them; if they want to complain about the prospect of their child maybe meeting a pig then they should have a better reason than “oh, we just don’t like pigs”. But Odone says that “feeling misunderstood or rejected by their peers at school, and frustrated in their ambitions beyond it, these youngsters are likely to be receptive to radical messages.” People will blow up trains because they met a pig? Are you serious?

Next is her observation, if you can call it that, that “not one of the 77 convicted on terrorism charges since the Terrorism Act 2000 attended a Muslim school”. What the Guardian article didn’t tell me was the comedy gem hiding after the semicolon: “one, Ader Ahmed, was home-schooled.” So basically he went to a really small faith school? I’m against home-schooling too. That plays right into my existing prejudice. (I realise the pamphlet isn’t aimed just at me, but then, I tend to think that people who share one opinion with me probably share other related ones too.)

Next, she starts implying that the alternative to proper Muslim schooling is little girls being packaged off to Pakistan to marry close relatives:

“The Drugs sex and rock and roll scene is not an option for Muslim girls,” Humeira Khan points out, “or if it is, it sparks huge conflict. So suddenly marrying them early or sending them home [to Pakistan or Bangladesh] becomes a huge pressure.”

Trust me, it’s not an option for anyone at school. Did you never even watch The Inbetweeners? Unless you’ve been sitting up all night watching Skins, which frankly raises even more worrying questions, there’s no reason to be afraid of what happens in the average British school. I’d be far more concerned about the effects of a Muslim education on a young girl. If that results in some people sending their children to more illiberal countries, I think we have to accept that as a consequence of being ahead of the rest of the world. Lead by example. You know or “liberate” Pakistan and Bangladesh.

The fifth chapter (by which point I was skipping the “example” schools entirely) points out that far from “educational ghettos where Christian children learn about Creationism and Muslim children about jihad, while Jewish children are taught they alone are Chosen People” (an accusation I would never make — they’re not educational! Ho ho!), “faith schools in the state system must follow the National Curriculum, including Citizenship education.” Well that’s swell and all, but — and again I don’t know a lot about schools so this may be totally wrong — surely a school which actually is pluralistic, multicultural and inclusive is going to be more effective than a school which is monoreligious, monocultural and exclusive, with a lesson (eating up an hour a week of expensive teaching time) in place to teach students tolerance as if it’s something that can be examined? Odone points out that “all maintained schools are under an ‘obligation’ to promote community cohesion,” but that doesn’t mean they actually do it. The government could mandate that all bank clerks must fly to work on jetpacks, it wouldn’t make it so.

Chapter six, ‘Smears’, mentions creationism. Odone claims that creationism in Britain is basically a myth:

Creationism, then, is not a wild fire sweeping the country’s schools; it is not taught in science classes in place of, or as an alternative to, evolution. Instead, Creationism is taught, in a handful of schools, as part of their study of the Bible in RE. Those Christian students who subscribe to a literal interpretation of the Bible will believe that God made the world, and man, in seven days; but thanks to the National Curriculum they will also know that science has proved otherwise. In this way their Christianity has to accommodate their learning.

Channel 4 say otherwise. And so does the scary Jewish headmaster in their film.

After that there is a summary saying “as we have seen, the charges against faith schools can be
dismissed one by one” which as I think we have seen, she didn’t actually do with any kind of success.

And that’s why she’s awarded this month’s Crackpot title.

John Sentamu is Archbishop of York. He’s referred to as Dr Sentamu in the Times, but his doctorate is in theology so I choose to disregard it. I realise that many theology degrees are about the study of religion as a phenomenon rather than a body of theories to be taken seriously, but he demonstrated on Wednesday that he’s crap at that, when he gave a speech on “The Role of Religion in Politics Today” which was wrong on most important issues.

Organised religion is always ambiguous. It can be both an instrument for good or for great evil.

When I consider the history of organised religions the world over and look at the present state of our world and the countless acts of violence committed in the name of God, is it any wonder that the third commandment given to Moses on Mount Sinai was not to misuse the name of the Lord?

Well maybe, although I can’t help feel God should have been a bit more specific. It must have occurred to him that the people misusing his name might think they were using it properly.

Such acknowledgements of wickedness give succour to those dogmatic atheists or illiberal secularists for whom any Utopian vision requires the eradication of all religion.

Succour is the wrong word here. Succour really means relief, whereas really what this provides is justification. Not sure what an illiberal secularist is. Sure, the two aren’t mutually exclusive, but they’re not common bedmates. And then he said…

Yet we only have to look to the Third Reich, the former Soviet Union and the present regimes of North Korea and Burma to consider that a society without religion rapidly loses faith in humanity.

This is just classic Atheists Are Immoral bullshit, isn’t it? And given that Hitler was a Christian it’s hard to see his point about the Third Reich.

In our new century organised religion has become not so much the enemy to be eradicated but the tool to be abused.

Whether it be the so called Salafi-Jihadism of Al Qaeda claiming the lives of innocent people perversely in the name of Allah or those narrowly focussed political parties attempting to usurp religious values and heritage, the purveyors of hatred and violence cover their wickedness with a religious cloak, or to use the words of Rabbi Lionel Blue, “the terrorists covering their own inner violence under a fig leaf of faith”.

Such abusers of religion lay easy claim to centuries of heritage with their lip service whilst their actions, and in some cases perverse ideologies, twist out of shape the garment of faith woven over centuries by faithful scholars and adherents.

I can’t fathom what the hell kind of mind comes up with this. What the hell is “the garment of faith woven over centuries by faithful scholars and adherents”? Either you think that a religion is true, in which case it was woven by God, or you don’t, in which case both sides are wrong. The sheer arrogance exhibited when he says “those people are wrong, you should listen to me if you want to know what God thinks” is astonishing. Why are they wrong? How do we know God isn’t on the terrorists’ side? They have as legitimate a claim to know God’s will as anyone else, surely?

Of course there are some for whom this business of our worship of God and the loving and serving our neighbour means that we should have no place in the political arena.

No, there aren’t. We don’t think the religious should be excluded from politics; we think that religion should be excluded from politics. If you want to sit in Parliament that’s fine; if you want to sit there and enact laws based on what you imagine an all-powerful being would like (but apparently chooses not to enforce) then there’s clearly something wrong there. Secularism is a lot easier to defend when you realise that God doesn’t exist and ‘his’ teachings were invented by superstitious people long before the advents of science and democracy, but it’s pretty easy to defend anyway, as long as you’re talking to someone passably rational.

It is perhaps no surprise that it is when I receive a letter from a correspondent–

From whom else does one receive letters?

–supporting my views I am congratulated for my apparent bravery in speaking out, whilst those who disagree with my stance castigate me in the most telling terms for getting involved in politics – didn’t I know that religion and politics should not mix?

The word Politics derives from the Greek for Polis – the City, for the place where life was lived and public business was done. How can anyone think that God is unconcerned or unconnected with any parts of our lives, public or private, or that we can build arenas which become no go areas for God?

How is that remotely relevant? If God existed then he would of course be able to go anywhere he liked (indeed, he’d already be there) and do what he wanted. He could rule the world if he chose to. But it would appear that he has chosen not to. His only contribution to the world is to write one of many indistinguishable but contradictory books of prophecy and instruction, and nobody can agree on which one it was, much less how it should be read or what it all means. We have no idea what the hell God thinks about anything, if he exists at all. And I for one don’t see what gives him any more right to a say than me. Frankly I think I should have more say than he does: he’s a mass-murdering misogynistic megalomaniac who thinks that just because he says he made the universe (a big claim for a guy with no proof who was conveniently the only witness) that means he gets to decide what’s Right and what’s Wrong. He shouldn’t get a vote: he should be sectioned.

Religion concerns the spirit in humanity, whereby we are able to recognize what is truth and what is justice;

This is true. You can recognise justice because it’s unconscionably vindictive and arbitrary.

whereas law is only the application, often imperfectly, of truth and justice in our everyday affairs.

…

Speaking in a Christian context, Desmond Tutu put it this way: “I don’t know what Bible people are reading when they say religion and politics do not mix”.

Isn’t that quite a lot like arguing “I don’t know which episode of Doctor Who people are watching when they say that the Daleks aren’t real”? Of course the Bible is going to be largely unsecular: it’s the fucking Bible. That’s what it’s for. If it was secular, it’d be an encyclopædia.

Not only do religion and politics mix, they must mix because religion enables politics to rediscover our duties and obligations to one another, to focus on service and community and to maintain a sense of liberty as a bulwark against an over-reaching state.

No, it doesn’t. It’s quite simple to do that without religion and religion is an active hinderance in many cases. Look at Islamic countries like Sudan or Saudi Arabia. You want to tell me that religion helps politics “maintain a sense of liberty” then you’d damn well better address those — especially after your little list of evil irreligious regimes, which notably failed to include modern secular democracies such as France, who are not what you’d call known for their genocidal nature. (Feel free to make a joke about their army surrendering to the oppressed minority.) And as for “over-reaching state” — until this year it was illegal to blaspheme! There were actual laws about which expletives I was allowed to use — me, an atheist. Granted the law was only really there as long as nobody tried to use it, but nevertheless…

I would like to consider each of these briefly in turn.

…

Is it any wonder that organisations in Britain such as the Hospice Movement, Amnesty International, Shelter, the Samaritans and countless other organisations and movements have been founded and motivated by those with a religious faith who recognise the responsibility and duty towards the other?

Hang on, Amnesty International? This would be the same Amnesty International who are “independent of any … religion” and who the Pope asked Catholics to boycott because he was worried they weren’t upholding his arbitrary stance on abortion? Nice example. Do you think these lists through at all?

More recently the Drop the Debt campaign, and Jubilee campaigns, taking the Biblical idea of Jubilee to reinterpret it as a measure of freeing the most indebted in our world from crippling debt, have demonstrated that such care and concern is not limited to the religious alone but are founded on religious ideas which are adopted by a wider society.

No, they’re not. Care and concern are part of being human. They might even by part of being some animals. They’re not inherently religious ideas. As an atheist, I find the implications of the idea that they are somewhat offensive. He goes on…

The trumpet which was once the herald of this nation’s greatness was the imperative of moral responsibility, of doing the right thing, where what was right was informed by a faith based understanding.

Now we are told, if we push for the end of religion in the public arena, in our politics and the public square, we will free ourselves from the shackles of an enslaving and moribund moral responsibility. However, if this is the direction which will shape our politics moral responsibility will be displaced not by reason, science or ethics but by sheer consumerism.

Notice again that he’s conflating the concepts of religion and moral responsibility, as if faith has some claim to morality. He even makes a distinction here between morality and ethics. Not really sure what the difference is but I think ‘morality’ is What God Says and ‘ethics’ involves committees.

He explained that ‘if each man and woman is a child of God, whom God loves and for whom Christ died, then there is in each a worth absolutely independent of all usefulness to society.”

This is a principle we need to hear afresh–

Yes, if only there was some kind of purely secular document that laid out that all men are created equal.

–not least in our treatment of the elderly, those refused asylum, young people in the care system, and the severely disabled, who, in my book, are clearly our teachers.

This explains a lot. (Sorry.)

Human rights without the safeguarding of a God-reference tends to set up rights which trump others’ rights when the mood music changes.

I wonder if he realises that the alternative to that is a system whereby only one person is alive at a time.

This religious vision needs once more to become a political vision for all to create a more just society and usher in God’s rule of justice upon earth.

Let us all do it, and let us do it now.

I always start to get a bit worried when people talk about “[ushering] in God’s rule of justice upon earth”. Sounds a bit culty to me. Religion is so commonplace that the absurdity of people discussing morality in terms of the opinions of an invisible grandad tends to pass me by, but once they start talking as if he’s actually coming back to rule the actual world the absurdity is just too in-your-face for anyone to miss.

Speaking of which, here’s an extract from the Q and A on his website:

Have you been to heaven before?

No, but I am trying to serve a God who I know is loved and worshipped in heaven. In heaven there’s no tears, no more crying, no more pain, there will be no sea either. The sea has always stood for violence. There will be no buildings because God Almighty will be giving it light and sun so that will be my destination. I also hope you’ll join me when I get there!

What kind of a ridiculous question is that? And more to the point, there will be no sea in heaven because the sea means violence? What the hell? Revelation 21:1 is presumably his source for this information, although the following verse does seem to imply buildings, or else the “holy city” will be a major let-down. There will be no sea in heaven, and no buildings. And no cuttlefish, and no two of spades. And none of those little figure-of-eight power adapters. And no brie. What kind of bizarre, arbitrary paradise is this? I like buildings! I like the sea!

This hasn’t been a great couple of weeks for Christianity in Britain. We learned that the Church of England is suffering because young people aren’t interested and the people who are are dying of old age, and we learned that Cliff Richard has decided to pitch in to help, presumably because he is almost uniquely placed to sympathise with that plight. His contribution is to publish a book of his favourite Bible stories, including the story of how God killed everyone in the world except for one family and then regretted it, the story of how God murdered all the innocent first-born sons in Egypt despite having “hardened the Pharaoh’s heart” to ensure he wouldn’t release the slaves, the story of how God masterminds and helps with the genocide in Jericho, the story of Solomon, who was granted wisdom and then went off to worship someone else, and the story of how God had his own son tortured to death to “pay for” sins committed by other people according to rules God devised in the first place. I can see how that will help.

Also trying to help is the Church Army, who want to hook youngsters into the faith by analogising it to Doctor Who. They point out the many similarities between the Doctor and Jesus, and the storylines in the show and in the Bible. And there are many similarities, although frankly almost every single one of them is pathetic. They say

The Tardis was considered to represent a Church by being an ordinary object that points to something higher while the Doctor was likened to Christ in his willingness to sacrifice himself for others.

What? You could liken The Brittas Empire to the Bible if you’re willing to go that far.

My favourite Christian reference is the kenotic storyline in the episode called “The Chameleon Arch”, which is a machine that takes away all the Doctor’s powers and renders him human. It is a clear nod towards Philippians 2.6-11, where the incarnation is described as God “emptying himself”.

Not all that clear, I’m afraid. I thought that was a sub-par and rather silly bit of technobabble which had to be tolerated to tell what was, in the event, a damn good story. A story which, incidentally, really didn’t bear more than a passing resemblance to Jesus’.

We saw the Doctor persuaded to save a family of Pompeians in one of the most recent episodes, surely a reference to Genesis and Abraham’s bargaining with God over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah.

I’m not at all sure it is a reference to that. It’s just a good dramatic theme. Nobody should read anything into the fact that it’s come up more than once. You might equally well argue that the fact that Biblical themes can be independently rewritten by a gay atheist suggests that they’re made up. Besides which, there’s shitloads of Bible and rather a lot of Doctor Who. Certainly there are parallels — but that just makes it more pathetic that these people are using such crap examples.

I don’t really know if Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor (as if that’s a real name) was tryong to help when he made a terribly dull speech entitled “Faith In Britain: A Personal Perspective”, which is buried somewhere on this webpage that’s sufficiently poorly designed that I can’t link directly to it. This is from the same lecture series as the previous winner’s speech. He says, for example, in this speech that

Only a modern person would think that religion is a private matter, something the individual does in his or her solitude

which presumably makes Jesus a “modern person”, since Matthew 6:6 says

But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.

I don’t mind that, of course. Ignorance of what the Bible says is what keeps Christianity going. What annoyed me was this bit:

I would want to encourage people of faith to regard those without faith with deep esteem because the hidden God is active in their lives as well as in the lives of those who believe.

He must be very well hidden.

Why can’t he “encourage people of faith to regard those without faith with deep esteem” because we’re smart enough to reject nonsense even when it surrounds us? Because we’ve managed to develop morality without been spoon-fed it by a book of made up rules? Because we’ve got enough confidence in our convictions to go against the flow and stand up for what we don’t believe in? If a Christian were to tell me that they regard me with deep esteem because of something God did, I would find that patronising and offensive, and I’d say so.

He also says this:

What did we do to generate unbelief? We spoke too easily about God, we spoke perhaps in the wrong way and we treated God as an idea rather than a living mystery to be approached in silence and prayer rather than in the arguments of the mind. If Christianity gave European thought the impression that God can be conceptually determined and pinned down and proved as a hypothesis, then it is hardly surprising that there has been resistance, as science and culture have developed, to worshipping this idea of God. We as Christians need to examine what we might have done to give people a misleading view of God. Faith in Britain might be improved by a deeper grasp of the mystery of God on the part of believers.

Now, I may have got the wrong end of the stick here, but to me that reads “whatever you think God is like, you’re wrong. He’s not like that, nor is he like anything else in particular, because he’s fundamentally mysterious and can’t be pinned down or rigorously defined. Of course, that doesn’t stop him existing and it doesn’t stop us knowing how he feels about gay people and stem cells.” If that is what he means, then he’s a moron.

It’s for largely this reason that I’m not sure Religious Crackpot of the Month is really viable any more. I think clearly all these people require recognition, but they can’t have it because it was this month that I read

The primary cause of unhappiness in Britain is not lack of material wealth but a loss of faith in God and religion, a group of MPs says today.

Apparently, there’s a report out by a group of all of five MPs who

argue that if values related to relationships, responsibility, trust, self-esteem and potential – all with their roots in the Judeo-Christian beliefs that once underpinned Western legislative philosophy – were to have greater emphasis in society, everyone’s wellbeing would improve.

So I did what I always do: I found the report. It turns out that the document, called “Faith In The Future” (the same pun, you’ll note, as the government used for their document), is available from a group called Theos, and it is to Theos that I award this month’s Religious Crackpot trophy.

Theos seem to be quite large and well established. They have a website that looks very professional (although it is in fact crap — it doesn’t even have an RSS feed), and describe themselves as

a public theology think tank which exists to undertake research and provide commentary on social and political arrangements. It aims to impact public opinion about the role of Christianity in society.

They go on to say

It was launched in November 2006 with the support of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, and the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor.

You probably know what I think of those endorsements.

Its first report “Doing God”: A Future for Faith in the Public Square examined the reasons why faith will play an increasingly significant role in public life.

They call themselves a “think tank”, although that’s a bit rich unless you count quoting the Bible as ‘thinking’. Really, they’re just a load of antidisestablishmentarianists hell-bent on reversing the work done since the Enlightenment in secularising society:

what Theos stands for

Society is embarking on a process of de-secularisation. Interest in spirituality is increasing across Western culture. Faith is on the agenda of both government and the media. In the arts, humanities and social sciences there are important intellectual developments currently taking place around questions of values and identity. Theos speaks into this new context. Our perspective is that faith is not just important for human flourishing and the renewal of society, but that society can only truly flourish if faith is given the space to do so. We reject notions of a sacred-secular divide.

And they’ve released quite a lot of frankly rather impenetrable literature about how secularism is bad, but they don’t really understand what it is. They can’t really tell it from atheism:

We can, though, at least make some assumptions. In a seriously secular country, the vast majority of people wouldn’t believe in God, however vaguely. Few would claim to belong to a religious group. And nobody would pray. What would be the point?

No. It’s entirely possible to be religious and secularist at the same time. Take this speech by Barack Obama (which I’ve copied from Dwindling in Unbelief):

We all know the story of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham is ordered by God to offer up his only son, and without argument, he takes Isaac to the mountaintop, binds him to an altar, and raises his knife, prepared to act as God has commanded.

Of course, in the end God sends down an angel to intercede at the very last minute, and Abraham passes God’s test of devotion.

But it’s fair to say that if any of us leaving this church saw Abraham on a roof of a building raising his knife, we would, at the very least, call the police and expect the Department of Children and Family Services to take Isaac away from Abraham. We would do so because we do not hear what Abraham hears, do not see what Abraham sees, true as those experiences may be. So the best we can do is act in accordance with those things that we all see, and that we all hear, be it common laws or basic reason.

Theos can publish all the inane sophistry they like, but the bottom line is that God doesn’t exist and even people who think he does can’t agree (in the case of Murphy-O’Connor, even with themselves) what he’s like or what he wants, and even those who feel they have a clear idea of both of these things can’t offer even the slightest shred of evidence or indeed any good reason to listen to them. So until Theos can prove that God exists, they will remain a sectarian group of crackpots trying to further Christianity’s already excessive influence on British politics.

And that’s just not on.

This month, in what can only be described as a surprising turn of events, the Religious Crackpot Thereof award goes to former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who is now, in his dotage, so intellectually vacuous that he wants to “awaken the world’s conscience” by encouraging us all to believe in god — but doesn’t even care which one. What the hell sense does that make? He says in his ridiculous speech

Let me be clear. I am not saying that it is extreme to believe your religious faith is the only true faith. Most people of faith do that.

and yet still thinks that belief, even in one of the other and presumably therefore false religions, is “necessary and vital”. (He makes one nod to atheism in the speech, before going straight back onto the topic of Faith Will Save The World as if atheists are like coach parties at gigs and just really want to be name-checked. As if when he utters the phrase “and those of none” all the atheists in the crowd will holler and unconditionally love him for the next year.) I’m sorry, but that’s moronic. I respect religious people as people. I don’t respect their religion. You know, like I respect someone who has the flu but not because they have the flu. It’s a pretty sound philosophy, I reckon. You can’t say that unquestioning faith in something that isn’t true is a good thing. That’s just lunatic.

We’ve all seen the clip of Alistair Campbell saying decisively “we don’t do God”, and possibly we even believed him. But since leaving office less than a year ago, Blair’s gone fucking mental.

First (and please forgive me if I get these in the wrong order), he told everyone how

If you are someone ‘of faith’ it is the focal point of belief in your life. There is no conceivable way that it wouldn’t affect your politics.

Then, he joined a cult. Now, there are some who would argue that the Catholic church is not, strictly speaking, a cult, but those people are wrong. I can think of no better definition* of “cult” than “a religion with a living leader” — and obviously I mean a leader who atheists agree is alive — and under that definition Catholicism qualifies (although only just on the “living” bit). In any case, the only significant difference between Anglicism and Catholicism is that the latter is cultier. Personally, I don’t really understand how it is possible for something which “is the focal point of belief in your life” to simultaneously be something you can change because your wife does it a bit differently. But then, I don’t understand how it’s possible to seriously think that there’s an invisible wizard watching you from space and expect me to trust you with my things, so perhaps I just don’t ‘get’ religion.

After that, he announced that he was to teach a course on “faith and globalisation” (which seems a lot like teaching a course on “petrol and fire safety”) at Yale’s schools of Management and Divinity. The BBC rather amusingy reported this as follows:

Details of the course are being discussed with Yale’s School of Management and Divinity.

That has to be a pretty strange school, although “using the promise of large, unverifiable rewards a long way into the future and the threat of ridiculously overblown punishment to control the lower classes” would seem to be a theme. And now, perhaps strangest of all, his latest attempt to ensure that he’s remembered for something other than illegal war is

…The Tony Blair Faith Foundation, which is designed to forge closer ties—

You don’t forge ties. You tie ties. That’s why they’re called ‘ties’.

—forge closer ties between young people of all major religions, as well as promoting the importance of faith in general.

Oh. His. God.

How does he not get it? He says “that religions of all kinds should be rescued from extremism”, but also wants to “[promote] the importance of faith in general“! (Quotes from the Independent, not from Blair; emphasis mine; quotation etiquette overwhelming.) It’s exactly “promoting the importance of faith in general” that causes all the problems! If we treated faith as unimportant then we’d still get all the good stuff, but nobody would be willing to explode themselves for it. Nobody would be alienated for rejecting it. Nobody would attempt to legislate based on it…

And therein lies the major problem with Blair’s supposedly new-found religiosity: did it ever affect policy? And the answer to that question is “yes”.

If you are someone ‘of faith’ it is the focal point of belief in your life. There is no conceivable way that it wouldn’t affect your politics.

It’s pretty easy to make the case that he lied to us. Well, to you. I was fourteen when he was elected and didn’t vote for him the second or third time anyway, so I pretty well get off the hook on this one. But he said (or at least, endorsed) “we don’t do God”, and then he said

If you are someone ‘of faith’ it is the focal point of belief in your life. There is no conceivable way that it wouldn’t affect your politics.

That could mean anything, from “my faith shaped my morals, and thereby affected my politics only indirectly, and I was honest about my morals” through “I took a lot from my religion and want to promote it, hence the faith school drive” to “I deferred important policy decisions to scripture, superstition and unqualified clergymen”. We really have no way of knowing a politician’s motives, so we’re left to judge them by their actions. And his actions included pushing unpopular, unmanageable, divisive and discriminatory faith-based schooling designed to brainwash children in a way more inescapable than their parents can manage, and joining an illegal war that George W Bush said God had told him to do. The latter I think was a largely secular (but still clearly wrong) decision. The former clearly wasn’t: no atheist would ever promote something like that, and whichever way you slice it it’s state endorsement of religion, even if no particular religion is specified. We don’t have an officially secular state here, which of course we should, but when you’ve promised that you “don’t do God” I think you still have an obligation to be as secular as possible.

Okay, so while in power he took the official “We Don’t Do God” line, but since than we also have the following quotes:

For me having faith was an important part of being able to do [my job as Prime Minister].

If you are someone ‘of faith’ it is the focal point of belief in your life. There is no conceivable way that it wouldn’t affect your politics.

It’s difficult to talk about religious faith in our political system. If you are in the American political system or others then you can talk about religious faith and people say ‘Yes, that’s fair enough’ and it is something they respond to quite naturally. You talk about it in our system and, frankly, people do think you’re a nutter. They sort of [think] you maybe go off and sit in the corner and commune with the man upstairs and then come back and say, ‘Right, I’ve been told the answer and that’s it’.

The reason that Alastair, my press secretary, has said ‘We don’t do God’ was not because he is opposed to religious faith, but because you always get into trouble talking about it.

You can’t have a religious faith and it be an insignificant aspect because it’s profound about you and about you as a human being … If I am honest about it, yes, of course, it was hugely important.

All of this paints, to me at least, a picture of a very devoutly religious man who pretended to be only the normal, wishy-washy agnostic-Anglican kind of religious man that people trust, so that they would elect him their leader. I’m sorry, but that to me is at best an enormous failure to disclose information. As a scientist, I know how this works. If you think there’s a potential conflict of interests, you first ignore it and then you declare it. You ignore it while you make the decisions it might affect, and then you declare it when you announce the results so that other people can judge how successfully you ignored it. In politics, other people have to judge you before you make the decisions it could affect, so his “ignore then declare” policy feels more like deceit.

He admits faith affected his politics. He admits that he kept very quiet about that. And he admits that that made him more electable. If President Bartlett was accused of electoral fraud, then I can’t imagine why Blair shouldn’t be. You should declare everything that could affect the decisions you will make in office before an election, otherwise you’re trying to gain power by deception. By that stage, you’re effectively a Bond villain.

Clearly he’s trying to help, but he’s doing it in a really fucking stupid way, and personally, this quote riles me:

The foundation will bring together Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists to promote faith as a relevant and positive force for good.

So, because I happen to subscribe to the view that believing in things that don’t exist is perhaps a tad childish, I don’t get to — indeed can’t — help eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, provide universal primary education or combat HIV and AIDS? Piss the fuck off, you proselytising, self-righteous, smug, moralistic, deluded cock.

Hmm. I wonder if he checks his referrer list.

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*This is a bigger problem than you might think: Wikipedia says

Some anthropologists and sociologists studying cults have argued that no one has yet been able to define “cult” in a way that enables the term to identify only groups that have been identified as problematic. However, without the “problematic” concern, scientific criteria of characteristics attributed to cults do exist. A little-known example is the Alexander and Rollins, 1984, scientific study concluding that the socially well-received group Alcoholics Anonymous is a cult by using the model of Lifton’s thought reform techniques and applying those to AA group’s indoctrination methodology. Even though the elements exist, several researchers pointed out the benefit of the organization. Vaillant, 2005, concluded that AA is beneficial.

I like my definition. It’s concise, and I think that religions with no leaders are just sort of things-that-happened, whereas ones with a living leader feel a lot more like exploitation of people’s natural tendencies towards faith, and that to me is the essence of what makes a cult.

So many people are worried about the future … but I think that a fundamental concern of all of our people at this present time and one which we ourselves as Christians must take very seriously is that concerning the future of human life itself.

Oh, shit! What’s happened?

This text is taken from Cardinal Keith O’Brien’s Easter sermon this year. I’ve copy-pasted most of the sermon into this blog-post: I encourage you merely to skim it.

The beliefs which we have previously held, and the standards by which we have lived throughout our lives and by which Christians have lived for the past 2000 years are being challenged at this present time in ways in which they have never been challenged before!

This is getting less and less scary by the sentence.

The norm has always been that children have been born as the result of the love of man and woman in the unity of a marriage. That belief has of course long been challenged. However I believe that a greater challenge than that even faces us – the possibility now facing our country is that animal-human embryos be produced with the excuse that perhaps certain diseases might find a cure from these resulting embryos.

“Excuse”? He says that as if scientists basically just love nothing more than fucking about with genetics to create monkeys with four asses, and just use the possibility of curing disease, saving lives and generally improving humanity’s lot as an “excuse”.

No matter how hard some Catholics try to hide the anti-science rhetoric, they never seem to quite manage it, do they?

What I am speaking of is the process whereby scientists create an embryo containing a mixture of animal and human genetic material. If I were preaching this homily in France, Germany, Italy, Canada or Australia I would be commending the government for rightly banning such grotesque procedures.

However here in Great Britain I am forced to condemn our government for not only permitting but encouraging such hideous practices.

Any moment now, he’s going to tell us what’s wrong with the idea, rather than just emoting about it…

Our Prime Minister, Gordon Brown has given the Government’s support to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. It is difficult to imagine a single piece of legislation which, more comprehensively, attacks the sanctity and dignity of human life than this particular Bill.

“Sanctity”? Ah, then it’s just an ideological objection to research that could save lives and advance human understanding of ourselves? That doesn’t count as a reason, and that right there is why he won this month’s award.

With full might of government endorsement, Gordon Brown is promoting a Bill that will allow the creation of animal-human hybrid embryos. He is promoting a Bill which will add to the 2.2 million human embryos already destroyed or experimented upon. He is promoting a Bill allowing scientists to create babies whose sole purpose will be to provide, without consent of anyone, parts of their organs or tissues.

Not babies, embryos. Do please get this right, or else you have no credibility at all. After all, why listen to his opinion if he doesn’t understand the science behind it? We’re talking about cell cultures, here, not fully-formed human beings.

Edit: the Bill also allows for the creation of “saviour siblings”, however, since the cells taken from these children to save their siblings are from the umbilical cord which is cut off anyway, I can’t imagine what his objection to that could be.

He is promoting a Bill which will sanction the raiding of dead people’s tissue to manufacture yet more embryos for experimentation. He is promoting a Bill which denies that a child has a biological father, allows tampering with birth certificates, removing biological parents, and inserting someone altogether different. And this Bill will indeed be used to further extend the abortion laws.

I can’t imagine that any of this is correct, but since the only news coverage this Bill has had has centred around the whining of scientifically and legally unqualified clergymen, it’s really hard to be sure. Certainly “the raiding of dead people’s tissue” is illegal under at least two different Acts, one of which is very recent (I have a donor card and it would still be illegal to use my tissues for research without my prior consent) so I can’t for a second believe that this provision really extends to anyone who hasn’t consented. And “tampering with birth certificates” is almost by definition illegal. Perhaps this Bill will allow people to alter the details on them in some pre-approved way, and perhaps O’Brien thinks that that’s too much and constitutes “tampering”, but without explaining what the Bill actually allows that he objects to, he might as well be just making things up.

Further it seems that Labour MPs are not to be allowed a free vote on this Bill and consequently are denied the right to vote according to their conscience – a right which all other political parties have allowed.

This Bill represents a monstrous attack on human rights, human dignity and human life.

You know, I’m not at all sure that it does. The cardinal never bothers to explain precisely what this attack is — possibly this is because he’s preaching to a group of Catholics, so he knows they’ll all support whatever he says because they have deferred their opinion-forming to a group of bigots in Italy, but even so he must have known (indeed, intended) that it would end up in the newspapers, or else he’d have talked about this “Pascal Mystery” nonsense that Christians are usually so keen that we discuss this time of year — but it’s clearly rubbish.

I think it was in A Devil’s Chaplain that I heard this argument explained best, but I can’t remember so here’s my attempt. I’ve used a different visual metaphor, so it’s not plagiarism (this is what they tell me at uni).

If you had enough paper, you could construct a really giant family tree which includes everything which as ever lived (on Earth, at least). Clearly people have certain rights, and grapes do not, but on this tree there would be an unbroken chain of links between the Pope and the grapes crushed to make his communion wine. The very concepts of “human” rights, “human” dignity and “human” life are nonsense when we realise this, because it implies that somewhere on that family tree you could draw a line and say “these are human; these are not” — but wherever you draw that line, there will be almost no difference between the last generation excluded and the first included. The intermediate stages have died out since, so we are left with a clear gap between “humans” and “animals”, and anywhere we choose to draw the line in that gap is effectively the same. This is very convenient for religious types who believe in “the sanctity of human life” and that God gave “humans” dominion over “animals”, that “animals” can be killed for meat but “humans” cannot even if they want to. The Bible is very clear on this, not least because it was written by people who didn’t know about evolution. (I am assuming for the sake of argument that everyone involved in this discussion accepts evolution. Anyone who doesn’t shouldn’t be allowed a say because they’re too ignorant to have a meaningful opinion.) When people start making animal-human hybrids, this gap will start to fill up with new creatures and we will be forced to reassess the situation.

This is, of course, a good thing: right now Christians (including former Presidential candidate Duncan Hunter) are using this ridiculous line drawn on a family tree to say that a single fertilised egg cell is “human” and therefore has full rights, whereas a primate (er, the monkey kind of primate) is an animal and doesn’t count. That’s clearly moronic, and so this arbitrary “line on a family tree” method of doling out rights clearly isn’t sufficient. There is (and/or has been) a continuum of different beings on Earth, and we need a method for granting rights and protection that reflects that. We already have it, to some extent: toddlers aren’t allowed to buy alcohol, 14-year-olds aren’t allowed to have sex, vote, or buy a house. The mentally ill have their rights curtailed for their own good. And equally, we allow you to be needlessly cruel to bacteria, insects and plants, but not to mammals or reptiles. Some people who claim to be vegetarians eat fish — so apparently fish are deemed insufficiently self-aware to get any rights, whereas cows are smart enough that they should be left alone. Clearly we do accept that some creatures have more rights than others and that it isn’t a simple, binary “human or not” question. Except, of course, when it’s convenient for the Church that we do not.

In some other European countries one could be jailed for doing what we intend to make legal.

Well, yes, but loads of countries have different laws than us. In Germany, there’s surprisingly little free speech when it comes to the Nazi regime (which seems almost perverse but I imagine they know what they’re doing). In Greece, Tetris is illegal if you play it in a cybercafé. And if you count Turkey as part of Europe, then there’s even stranger examples.

In some other European countries, France say, it would (quite rightly) be illegal to run a Catholic school. Hasn’t mentioned that one yet, has he?

I can say that the government has no mandate for these changes: they were not in any election manifesto, nor do they enjoy widespread public support. The opposite has indeed taken place – the time allowed for debate in Parliament and indeed in the country at large has been shockingly short.

Maybe that’s because it basically isn’t all that important in real life?

One might say that in our country we are about to have a public government endorsement of experiments of Frankenstein proportion – without many people really being aware of what is going on.

Many excuses are being made for this present legislation, particularly that cures will soon be found for various diseases which afflict mankind through this legislation. Rather the opposite seems to be the case when cells required for ongoing investigation into cures through medical science can take place through cells obtained in other ways from human bodies and certainly not through the creation of animal-human embryos.

I cannot refute this lase sentence as I cannot make any sense of it.

I contend that matters of such concern to the peoples of our countries should not be left quite simply to a vote by members of Parliament. Along with my colleagues in England and Wales and my brother Bishops here in Scotland I would maintain that the establishment of a single permanent statutory national bioethics commission is something which would indeed bring considerable benefits. As I indicated recently in a letter to the Prime Minister: “This would appear to be the only way that the issues raised by the swiftly developing biotechnology industry can be adequately discussed and weighed up in a body which engages with public concerns and informs the government and parliament on matters which will continue to raise such unimagined and complex ethical questions”.

I quite agree that it raises complex ethical questions, however I would add the following:

• Raising questions is in all cases a good thing. The questions were still there and deserving of answers before this raised them, and anything that makes people think about them can only advance mankind. The idea that raising questions is objectionable is an inherently religious one, and I don’t think that cardinals are remotely qualified to weigh in on them — least of all ones who don’t know the difference between a baby and an embryo.
• Complex ethical questions have complex answers, and “ban it ban it ban it” is not a complex answer. It’s a knee-jerk reaction to something that raises awkward questions and goes vaguely against the teachings of the Bible. It may be that, after a complex investigation, it turns out that the best thing to do is to ban it, but until you have a better reason than that, you don’t get a say.

Of course, “the establishment of a single permanent statutory national bioethics commission” might be a good idea (as long as we’re spelling “establishment” with a small ‘e’), but it depends on how much money it would take compared to how much it would cost for Parliament and the existing ethics commissions to do it (and the comparative results thereof) — and I can’t imagine cardinals have any useful information to base that call on.

Our voice must be heard and that voice must be listened to especially by the members of Parliament who will soon vote on this issue in the House of Commons.

As best I can figure, “our” in this sentence appears to refer to a group of bishops, a group who already have far too much say in Parliament.

Sadly many members of Parliament do not seem concerned – or rather are in a certain ignorance of what is going to happen.

Spot the hypocrisy. Go on. Have a go.

In January of this year our Catholic Parliamentary Office wrote to all of Scotland’s 59 members of Parliament asking them how they intended to vote. As of today only 9 have bothered to reply. Over three weeks ago Bishop Philip Tartaglia of Paisley wrote to Gordon Brown urging him to allow all his MPs a free vote – as of today he has not even had an acknowledgement!

Our Church, and I personally, have, I think, done all the ‘right things’. We have responded to the consultation document; we have sent letters to all of Scotland’s Members of Parliament; we have written to the Prime Minister; we are speaking publicly about what is going on in our name and in our country. Further, I recently signed a letter with other Church Leaders which concluded: “This Bill goes against what most people, Christian or not, reckon is common sense. The idea of mixing human and animal genes is not just evil. It’s crazy!”.

I’ve noticed that while the word “reckon” appears in that quote, the word “because” does not.

Until that sentence, there was always a chance I would forgive him. But come on. “The idea of mixing human and animal genes is … evil” — why? Why is it evil? What is even remotely evil about it? Who gets hurt? What possible Bad Thing will happen as a result? Ah, you see, but that’s not what “Evil” means if you’re religious. If you’re a Christian, then Good is Whatever God Decides Good Is, and Evil is Everything Else. And “the idea of mixing human and animal genes is … crazy!”? Well, surely you have to actually understand the reasons (note: not excuses) for doing it before you get to decide whether or not it’s a crazy thing to do?

I would have said that persecuting homosexuals was evil. I would have said that blocking attempts to introduce life-saving contraception into Africa to promote your (very profitable) religion was evil. I would have said that believing that what is very obviously just a little disc of bread was, in strict point of fact, the literal body of a 2000-year-dead man was crazy. I would have said that talking to an invisible wizard who doesn’t exist and expecting a reply was crazy.

If you want to tell me genetics research is “evil” and “crazy” then you’re going to have to provide some kind of an argument. Especially if you’re going to preach this way to the general public and then demand a vote. You’re effectively trying to dictate policy.

Today as we celebrate in the resurrection the triumph of life over death I urge you to ensure that life continues to triumph over these deathly proposals. I know that many of you have already made your views known to your members of Parliament. I ask you to continue to do that.

No! Do some sodding research, and then you can make your views heard. Has it occurred to you that perhaps the reason there hasn’t been a vote is that it would be a waste of time? Personally, I think the idea of an elected government (rather than simply having a referendum on everything) is so that we can have a number of trusted people, with expert advisers, making informed decisions instead of an angry, illiterate mob making lowest-common-denominator, religiously motivated, knee-jerk, tabloid, reactionary arbitration on everything from science to the economy. Guess what? It turns out the world is actually quite complicated, and you can’t govern justly by applying a bunch of rules from a book or “what [you] reckon is common sense”! Common sense doesn’t apply to complex situations. If it did, there would be no universities.

The first Religious Crackpot Of The Month this year goes to Patrick O’Donoghue. There are those who would prefer I call him “the Right Reverence Patrick O’Donoghue”, but I won’t be doing that. I think that people’s relative reverence and honourability is something they earn by their actions and not something they’re granted by their job titles. And, since this doesn’t appear to be 1992, I won’t be using the word “right” as an intensifier. Patrick O’Donoghue is shockingly ignorant, not least of the rules of chess: despite being Bishop of Lancaster, he is moving decidedly backwards.

He has earned this dubious honour by sending what the Guardian called “a 66-page document” to all the Catholic schools in his diocese, though I’ve found it and it is in fact a 68-page document with two blank pages at the end. (It’s a PDF; they recommend Foxit to read it. I don’t know what’s wrong with Acrobat Reader; possibly Adobe refuse to condemn abortion or something.)

He is by no means the only crackpot mentioned in the article — the Vatican body who endorsed his document must be at least as stupid as its author — but he is the most vocally insane of them all. So let’s be explicit about why he in particular is getting this award. (It is perhaps worth noting that if I had my way, this letter would never have existed as there would be no faith schools to receive it, although if I really had my way there would be no bishop to send it either.)

Normally I’d be saying that he, like most other winners of the prize, is placing religious teachings above basic safety advice, but in this case that would be being far, far too kind. The teachings he’s advocating are barely even religious — there’s not a single word in the Bible about condoms. This isn’t religion. Religion is when someone writes a book which, centuries later, is found and taken far, far too seriously. What we have here is a large organisation deciding that something is bad and dictating that all their followers will believe it too. This isn’t religion: this is cult behaviour (though there’s less difference than most people would care to admit).

Worse still, he doesn’t consider that he is putting it above basic safety advice because he disputes that condoms can prevent AIDS.

Parents must insist on continence outside marriage and fidelity in marriage as the only true and secure education for the prevention of AIDS. Parents, schools, and colleges must also reject the promotion of so-called “safe sex” or “safer sex”, a dangerous and immoral policy based on the deluded theory that the condom can provide adequate protection against AIDS.

Exactly why he thinks this is unclear. At no point does he bother to explain how a 120 nanometre wide retrovirus can penetrate seventy thousand nanometres of rubber in only a few minutes. This paragraph cites a book called The Truth And Meaning Of Human Sexuality as its only source, so I did a quick Google search and discovered that the book in question was published by The Catholic Library, and its full text is available on their website. To save you the bother of looking, the paragraph is a direct quote from the book (paragraph 139; as we know, Catholics believe that any sentence with a number is true) and the book doesn’t justify it any further either. Presumably they just believe unquestioningly whatever would best serve their agenda if it were true. (That, one might argue, is very much the idea of religion in any case.)

He also repeats the Vatican’s anti-Amnesty International stance:

Schools and colleges must not support charities or groups that promote or fund anti-life policies, such as Red Nose Day and Amnesty International, which now advocates abortion.

To be fair to him, he also suggests some non-abortion-condoning alternative organisations, but I can’t imagine any of them have the resources Amnesty do, and in any case, Amnesty International do not advocate abortion! He goes further, though (and I should mention for the sake of integrity that the ellipsis below represents a 38-page break, much of which I didn’t read):

Anything that evokes wonder and reflection about the fundamental questions of human existence in Science, English, or Art, for example, is an opportunity to teach the truths of the faith.

…

Under no circumstances should any outside authority or agency that is not fully qualified to speak on behalf of the Catholic Church ever be allowed to speak to pupils or individuals on sexual or any other matter involving faith and morals. Nor should a Catholic school or college ever refer a pupil to an outside agency for advice or counselling; such is the prerogative only of the parent.

That’s nothing more or less than indoctrination: under his system, a pupil in a Catholic school is not allowed to talk to anybody except Catholic representatives about any aspect of religion or emotion (or, probably anything except mathematics, and even then the distinction between the numbers three and one is probably taboo). This will lead to them being effectively brainwashed, exposed to only one ideology every day for 15 of their most formative years. He says in the Guardian that this is “absolute rubbish”, but then he would say that, because apparently he’s a total bastard who will say anything if he thinks it will get people on his side.

Like most religious crackpots, O’Donoghue utterly fails to understand the meaning of the word “secular”. Like the current incumbent Specifically Mormon Crackpot of The Year, he seems to think that it is itself a religion. He demonstrates this very neatly when he says “the secular view … may not be presented as neutral information”. The whole point of secularism is that it is completely neutral. It considers all ideas purely on their own merits, affording none any special treatment regardless of what various religions may say about them. O’Donoghue would presumably prefer the “woo” version of neutrality, where all ideas are given equal credit regardless of their relative merit. This system is in reality as neutral as giving poorer entrants in a competition a proportional head start so that all players have an equal chance of winning: clearly it benefits the worst and removes any incentive to improve, and only a really stupid sport would do that.

In fact, he appears to be falling into another brain-trap more commonly associated with quacks than crackpots: he’s adopted an Us And Them mentality. Creationists do this, by describing anything that contradicts creationism as “evolutionist”, including the Big Bang theory, geology and abiogenesis, which have nothing at all to do with evolution. Homeopaths call anything that contradicts homeopathy “allopathic”, including vaccines, chemistry, epidemiology and basic scientific methodology. Here, O’Donoghue would appear to be saying that anything which contradicts the Vatican’s random assertions is part of some “secular” conspiracy. Let me let you in on a little secret: there is no secular conspiracy. It just wouldn’t work. It’d be like herding cats. There is no “secular view”: secularism is not a religion, or an ideology or a political affiliation; it’s just a single idea (that religious teachings should be ignored wherever possible) with a name. Most secularists agree on other things too, but that’s largely because great — or at least, non-awful — minds are known to think alike.

He wants teachers to discuss “the ’sacrament of marriage’” and to “insist that contraception [is] wrong”, all while criticising secularism for being insufficiently “neutral”.

I’ve not read the whole thing. I don’t think I could do that to myself. Luckily, the document (called “Fit For Mission? A Guide”) ends with a summarised list of “actions” for schools. Here are a few of them (word for word):

• Create/enhance respect for the doctrinal and moral truth safeguarded by the Pope and the Bishops
• Challenge TV broadcasts, films and books … that are disrespectful, suspicious and scornful of Christ and His Church.

It should be noted at this point that Jesus, being long dead by the time it was established, has never publicly endorsed the Catholic church and would in all probability loathe it as much as I do.

• Promote films and books that build up trust and enthusiasm for the faith.
• Ensure support is given to Chaplains so they can complete their role, including evangelisation and catechesis through proclamation of the Word.
• Provide opportunity for the governing body to discuss and pray about this document.

What the fuck? How will that help? Does he think God is going to personally reply and say “yeah, it’s not a bad document but I didn’t like the font”?

• Teach the Trinity
• Use the Core Curriculum of the Catholic Church

…whatever that is; Google doesn’t know.

• Teaching and Learning for the profession of faith
• Ensure active participation in the Liturgy is encourage [sic]

He actually considers liturgy a basic human need, presumably alongside oxygen and nutrition (assuming he doesn’t think those are “deluded theories” too.

• Teach the real presence from a Young Age [sic]
• Promote our call to holiness
• Ensure [not 'encourage'] regular prayers for vocations
• Ensure that no outside authority or agency … is allowed to speak to pupils … on … any matter involving faith and morals
• Ensure that pupils are never referred to an outside agency for advice or counselling
• Carefully scrutinise Year Planners to ensure they do not promote the services of organisations incompatible with the Church’s moral teaching
• Teach meditation on the Word of God
• Teach Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament
• Arrange weekly adoration of the Blesses Sacrament [sic]
• Teach Devotion to Our Lady and the Rosary

(It’s not mentioned whether this devotion should be weekly or not.)

• Ensure [not 'encourage'] meaningful memorisation of basic prayers
• Teach Devotion to the Saints

Honestly, those last dozen read like some kind of scary cult handbook. Because that is precisely what this document is. It is a guide to how to effectively hijack a child’s state-funded education and use it to brainwash them into your religion, thus ensuring a nice supply of minds (and money) in the future. That people would do such a thing is still shocking to me, and that they would then be widely thought of as good people is almost as bad.

You can email the team behind the report at Mission.Review@LancasterRcDiocese.org.uk. I intend to. (I will of course blog any and all relevant correspondence.)

Edit:

They also have something they call a “blog”, but is in fact just a boring newsletter powered by WordPress. The skin they’ve chosen for it was designed by a girl who “at an early age [decided for herself] that there are no gods or supernatural forces”. Presumably they will take more care than this when “scrutinising” those Year Planners.

A few days ago, M. le Prof d’Anglais nominated Mitt Romney (as if that’s a proper name) for January’s Religious Crackpot of the Month. I thought about this, but eventually decided that I wasn’t going to lump him in with people of other faiths, purely and simply because that’s what he wants us to do.

Romney, for those of you who don’t know, is one of the 2008 presidential candidates. He’s hoping to be the Republican candidate, and if successful (which he probably won’t be), he’ll have to face an election against the Democratic candidate — probably either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama as I understand these things from watching The Daily Show.

Recently he made a speech about faith in America, hoping to get the votes of the huge numbers of Christians in America  by pretending to be one. He was introduced by a man who’s noted for saying that an atheist could never really be a true patriotic American (which is offensive in itself but is downright terrifying when you consider than man used to be the president), so to drive the point home, Romney is shown on his website standing in front of no fewer than eight American flags. I shall now paste a cut down version of his speech, which is available in full on his website, because he’s actually proud of his insane beliefs.

Today, I wish to address a topic which I believe is fundamental to America’s greatness: our religious liberty.

…

There are some who may feel that religion is not a matter to be seriously considered in the context of the weighty threats that face us. If so, they are at odds with the nation’s founders, for they, when our nation faced its greatest peril, sought the blessings of the Creator. And further, they discovered the essential connection between the survival of a free land and the protection of religious freedom. … Our constitution was made for a moral and religious people. Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.

Just to interrupt Mr Romney there, this argument is fantastically weak. He’s implicitly equating “religious freedom” with religion itself, and he’s implicitly equating “in the context of the weighty threats that face us” with “in politics”. It’s cunning phrasing, and if I’m generous then I assume he doesn’t know he’s doing it (not least because he’s got a team of lackeys to write this stuff for him).

A person should not be elected because of his faith nor should he be rejected because of his faith.

Remember this, and see if he goes back on it.

Let me assure you that no authorities of my church, or of any other church for that matter, will ever exert influence on presidential decisions. Their authority is theirs, within the province of church affairs, and it ends where the affairs of the nation begin.

Ah, so he’s a secularist, that’s good to know–

We separate church and state affairs in this country, and for good reason. No religion should dictate to the state nor should the state interfere with the free practice of religion. But in recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America – the religion of secularism. They are wrong.

Ah, no, no, in fact he’s an idiot. “The religion of secularism”? That’s a bit like saying “the number minus” or “the colour invisible”.

We cherish these sacred rights, and secure them in our Constitutional order. Foremost do we protect religious liberty, not as a matter of policy but as a matter of right. There will be no established church, and we are guaranteed the free exercise of our religion.

…

And you can be certain of this: Any believer in religious freedom, any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty, has a friend and ally in me. And so it is for hundreds of millions of our countrymen: we do not insist on a single strain of religion – rather, we welcome our nation’s symphony of faith.

Throughout his speech, which you can watch on his website and which sounds more like a sermon than a political address,  you may notice he keeps making implicit anti-atheist remarks like “freedom requires religion” and “our constitution was made for … religious people”.  Now antisemitism is not encouraged, so how does he think America would tolerate an anti-atheist president? Well, the fact is that for the most part they would (and have done before), because America has a very strong anti-atheist brigade, to the point where many atheists face much the same problems telling their parents of their apostasy as gay people did admitting their homosexuality all those years ago.

He says  “any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty has a friend and ally in me”, implying that he is no friend or ally to atheist Americans, or indeed agnostic or Buddhist Americans. That’s a pretty large chunk of the population — I think it works out around 10%. One in ten Americans would not have an ally in the president. That’s alarming. He repeatedly asserts that religious freedom is important, but the idea that someone might exercise that freedom by opting out of the whole ridiculous charade seems to offend him — which is a bit fucking rich when he said in the same speech that “religious tolerance would be a shallow principle indeed if it were reserved only for faiths with which we agree”.

He said this, you see, because he is a Mormon*. He wanted to make sure that everyone was clear that he was a religious man of faith, and that they should support him because he’s religious and has faith, but he wasn’t going to start telling them exactly what his faith is, because of course that “would enable the very religious test the founders prohibited in the Constitution”. I think he imagines that the First Amendment is something he can apply as and when is convenient, which makes sense considering his wholesale support for Guantanamo Bay, torture, wiretapping and basically whatever else anyone feels like doing to those nasty fundamentalist Muslims (who apparently are also not covered by the phrase “any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty has a friend and ally in me”).

Instead, I have created a special award, Specifically Mormon Crackpot, just for him, and as he’s the only Specifically Mormon Crackpot we’ve had, and since it’s December, I can safely award him the award for the entire year, all at once. Which is quite fair, I think, since he so plainly deserves it.

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*Apparently, Mormonism is one of those religions that don’t let you have any fun. It seems that someone once decided that Christianity was doing it wrong, and that they had the proper version, so in that sense it’s kind of like a cult version of Islam. And here’s a support site for its victims. Most religions have one or two of these.

You all know the story. A teacher from Liverpool living and working in Sudan allowed her class to vote on the name of a teddy bear, which was then sent home with each of them in turn, and afterwards each child wrote about what they did that weekend in a kind of teddy bear diary. Thoroughly wholesome classroom activity, until the children decided on the name Mohammed, at which point of course it became blasphemy.

You can tell it was blasphemy because of course naming something Mohammed is an insult to the Prophet Mohammed, the father of Islam who died in the year 632 when he was stoned to death for nicknaming his penis “Little Mo”. (It’s a strange world that considers naming a class teddy bear after a paedophile offensive because the paedophile is sacred.) Clearly it was insensitive of her to allow the children to choose this name, and clearly she should have punished the boy who suggested it. His name, by the way, is Mohammed. Now the case has gone to trial, with the full support of the Sudanese justice minister, whose name is also Mohammed.

Mohammed is the most common name in Sudan, and indeed the second most common here, because of the strange obsession in Islamic cultures with naming every single man and boy in sight Mohammed, just in case dressing all the women in face-covering veils wasn’t confusing enough. Really they should call all the women the same thing and at least save everyone the embarrassment of admitting they can’t tell who that is under the burkha. This strange obsession probably comes from people like Ibrahim Mogra, chairman of the Muslim Council of Britain’s interfaith relations committee and an imam in Leicester, who says “some of us believe we are assured of heaven if we name our children Mohammed”. Seriously, how stupid do your beliefs have to be before you’ll question them? Your god will give you eternal paradise if you give your son a certain name — and damn you to hell if you give your stuffed bear the same name? You have to wonder if that god might be drunk on his own power. What’s next, not eating certain foods on certain days of the week? Thou Shalt Wear A Funny Hat?

Of course, there’s no reason at all to assume he does say that. None of this stuff that the more insane Muslims complain so loudly about are found anywhere in the Koran. The “no pictures of Mohammed” rule comes from a line that states that it’s impossible to accurately draw Allah. Therefore obviously it’s offensive to try and obviously the same applies to anyone else they feel like. And equally obviously it’s perfectly okay for them to burn quite irrelevant embassies and publicly whip schoolteachers should anyone break those rules.

The general reaction from everyone in the world is that the Sudanese authorities have over-reacted. Their ruling is that the teacher serve fifteen days in prison and then be deported, which the director of her school described as “very fair,” considering that “she could have had six months and [forty] lashes and a fine”. All she got was a fortnight in prison and then deported — and she’s only being deported from Sudan which in many ways is probably a favour to her. They’re mental in Sudan, you know –I hear they’ll deport you for naming a toy the wrong thing. In any case, she really can’t stay in Sudan anyway, because a lot of clerics there are demanding she be executed! That’s what they consider “justice”, apparently: name a toy bear Mohammed, death by firing squad.

That sounds crazy — because of course it is — but you have to see it from their point of view: they don’t see it as an isolated incident. Oh, no, they think it’s part of a western plot of destroy Islam (which to be fair is starting to look like a pretty good idea). I don’t know what it is about extremist Muslims that turns them into conspiracy theorists, but something must be doing it. These clerics, many of whom are called Mohammed, chant things like “shame on the UK” as if somehow some quite imaginary entity called “The UK” is responsible for the offence caused to Sudanese nutters by Sudanese children in Sudan, and when a Danish cartoonist drew a picture they didn’t like, they ignored him and attacked the Danish embassy instead, reasoning that any and all Danes were responsible and their interests would be most efficiently served by killing the nearest available ones. It’s entirely possible this is because they can’t use aeroplanes — they need the carbon credits for all their effigy and flag barbecues. (The other aspect of this which amuses me is that if there was a western “war on Islam” then it would be because Islam had started it when they attacked the embassy. That is an act of war.)

The BBC have serialised this story, by posting a long page almost identical to the last every time the slightest thing changes, because that’s how they like to run a website. According to one, “police … seized the book [which is the bear's diary and says "My Name Is Mohammed" on the front] and asked to interview the girl who owned the bear”. If they seize the bear as well I hope they enter into the spirit of the thing and write a twenty-fourth chapter in the bear’s diary detailing his being taken into custody and sealed in an evidence bag. That would make a good class display. It would teach the children the dangers of using irrational nonsense as a basis for government policy, for one thing, which might result in them growing up with a healthy disdain for the rantings of over-zealous religious wingnuts.

For my bit, I’m awarding those wingnuts the Religious Crackpot Of The Month for this month: the mad clerics shouting for death, the so-called justice department, the police, the parents who complained, the school director, and basically everybody involved in the ridiculous handling of this nonsense.

Here’s a delightfully heart-warming story. Well, a story, anyway.

It’s the story of a comedy show called Allah Made Me Funny. It’s a Muslim comedy show which will be on at Dundee University in a couple of weeks, which Dundee describe as “comedy from an Islamic perspective that is not just for Muslims, but for everyone, [which] we are showing it as part of our Islam awareness week at the university… to show the comic side of Islam and show that it is not just a serious religion,” with “nothing in it… that is offensive to the religion”. (You can watch some on the website. In fact, it’ll start chatting at you the moment the page loads. Probably I should have mentioned that sooner, and indeed probably now I should go back and edit it in, but I won’t.)

The show will not be on at Glasgow Caledonian University, because some Muslim students there complained. I don’t know if they found the title offensive (it looks offensive but patently isn’t if you give it a moment’s thought) or if they just kind of assumed it would be offensive, or maybe they’d seen the show and Dundee’s spokesman was just lying, but it would seem that Muslims can now be offended by “comedy from an Islamic perspective”.

And yes, I am a little annoyed that the university caved in to the complainants, but more than that I’m shocked at how fucking stupid these people are. They’ve complained, implicitly on religious grounds, about something designed specifically to soften the perception that their religion is an over-sensitive, mental one that complains about everything. Unfortunately the article didn’t name the morons in question, so I can’t award Religious Crackpot Of The Month to them by name, but if they’re reading this then they know who they are. Or more probably they don’t because they’re so utterly and enormously brainless.

This month, the Religious Crackpot Of The Month award (I love how these nutters just roll around, regular as clockwork, at least once a month) goes to General Sir Richard Dannatt, who is something called the Chief of General Staff, seen here in fancy dress as a magpie’s nest. He wins the award primarily for making this comment:

In my business, asking people to risk their lives is part of the job, but doing so without giving them the chance to understand that there is a life after death is something of a betrayal, and I think there is very much an obligation on …a Christian leader to include a spiritual dimension into his people’s preparations for operations, and the general conduct of t