Apathy Sketchpad

Guess what Geraint Tudur recently described as

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

Go on. Have a guess.

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

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

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

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

Fairly recently I read this article on the Daily Kos, about a Powerpoint presentation being shown to the US Air Force. It’s pushing religion, obviously — it’s written by the chaplain. I still really have no idea what chaplains are for. I think our university has one and I have no idea what, if anything, he does. But the fact that a chaplain wrote a presentation pushing religion is not remarkable or necessarily bad. What is wrong with this one is that it’s pushing religion — in fact, it’s pushing creationism — as a way of fighting suicide. (Because, you know, nobody religious has ever killed themselves and if you think they have then you must have been watching the lying News or something.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[BPSDB]

That’s right, two Crackpot posts in a row. And they said it couldn’t be done.

This month, it’s everyone involved in the most pointless argument I have ever heard of:

Holocaust survivors said Monday they are through trying to negotiate with the Mormon church over posthumous baptisms of Jews killed in Nazi concentration camps. … ”We ask you to respect us and our Judaism just as we respect your religion,” [Ernest Michel, honorary chairman of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors] said in a statement released ahead of the news conference. “We ask you to leave our six million Jews, all victims of the Holocaust, alone, they suffered enough. … Baptism of a Jewish Holocaust victim and then merely removing that name from the database is just not acceptable,”

Essentially, among the less insane beliefs of the Mormon church is that in order to be reunited in the afterlife, you need to retrospectively baptise your ancestors. A group of Jews are angry at this, even though they presumably believe that a Mormon baptism is just a meaningless set of rituals that has absolutely no effect on reality. The Jews say this isn’t good enough because according to Michel

100 years from now, how will they be able to guarantee that my mother and father of blessed memory who lived as Jews and were slaughtered by Hitler for no other reason than they were Jews, will someday not be identified as Mormon victims of the Holocaust?

It seems to me that the clue is in the question there. I wonder if Michel routinely identifies people in the most passably-accurate-but-misleading way he can think of, referring to his family the way I might summarise a random internet contact if I want to pass on something from a blog that amuses me… I wonder if he has children and if so whether they tell their friends that they can’t come out to play because the honorary chairman of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors says they have to do their homework first. He should go on QI.

But no. According to the link I just posted, the standard Mormon defence is that the soul of the dead person doesn’t have to accept the baptism.

This just seems too surreal to me. I would have thought that Jews would ignore any rituals the Mormons did, believing them to be nonsense. I wouldn’t care at all if they wanted to baptise me. I’m pretty sure I’m already baptised into something, though I can’t for the life of me recall what exactly it is. Something with Jesus. I’d have thought that the Jewish faith, which teaches that the soul is already in heaven and not, as the Mormons think, in God’s waiting room watching the Holy Goldfish amble about for centuries on end and reading millenium-old magazines and cardboard books for four-year-olds, and so they wouldn’t even be told about the offer of baptism. I would have thought that, being dead, if the baptisee still has any existence then they’d have a pretty good idea if they’d picked the right religion by now and be in a far better place to make this call than their surviving relatives. This is like watching children try to argue semantics.

In fact, you know what this is like? I think I’ve found a parallel. (Bonus for regular readers: you may recognise the poster.)

First of all, I realise that technically it is November.

I had vaguely intended to give October’s award to this guy, a crazy US evangelical type who calls himself “The Hon. James David Manning, PhD” as if that’s a remotely plausible title and operates under the impressively crap slogan “All Jesus, All the Time”. I was shown the site by Friz, who linked me to a delightfully silly video of Manning explaining that the best way to defeat Obama was to refuse to refer to him by his real name, and instead to call him “TAAARZAAAN!” every time as if anyone at all would know who or what you were on about if you did. My second favourite part of the clip was his utter failure to follow his own rule even for the few minutes of video. My favourite part was the way he kept repeating the phrase “half-black, half-white, raised by an ape” as if people were going to believe that Barack Obama was raised by an ape if he did. (Strictly, of course, Obama was raised by a human, and a human is a type of ape, but Manning doesn’t strike me as someone who will accept either of those things.)

Sadly, the video has been taken down. So I thought maybe I’d give it to Tim Hastie-Smith, who thinks that we need faith schools to defeat the X-Factor, because of course policy that makes a modicum sense is so 80s.

But then, Hastie-Smith seems (other than his name) to be a rather dull man, whereas Manning is relentlessly mad. For one thing, he’s written a pamphlet called “Focus On Purgatory”, which is the same pamphlet as “Focus On Heaven” but it takes ages to download.

Actually, I can’t read Focus On Purgatory, because it costs $12 and there’s no amount of dollar devaluation that could make that sound like a good deal. Presumably, charging $12 for a shitty pamphlet is one of the tips in his other book, “God’s Business Plan”. Which is a shame, because apparently the pamphlet “offers concrete proof to the validity and purpose of purgatory”.

He also seems to have a hand in schooling. (”All Excellence, All the Time”. Honestly, it’s only slightly less stupid than Mr Burns starting a religion.) Here is the timetable (PDF):

• Monday – Write the Dictionary Day
• Tuesday – Remember the Dictionary Day
• Wednesday – Learn the Hymns Day
• Thursday – World Knowledge Day
• Friday – World Events Day

Sounds awful, doesn’t it? And yet I’m not going to use it as an argument against faith schools, because what we really have here is an argument against idiot schools. There does seem to be one advantage for the students, though.

The line between parody and reality is thin and it’s caught me out before (although I would argue that once something is indistinguishable from that which it aims to lampoon, that makes it a bad parody), but this would seem to be real even if lesson three is a rickroll. So I’m giving him the award anyway, hilarious Tarzan video or no.

This month, I am awarding Crackpot to the Italian government prosecutors, who have really managed to pull it out of the bag by simultaneously being wrong and stupid. Not a good combination when you’re in a position of any kind of power.

Apparently, they have decided to prosecute a comedian called Sabrina Guzzanti. Her crime, such as they think it is, was this: she said in her act that within twenty years Italian schoolteachers would be vetted by the Vatican,

But then, within 20 years the Pope will be where he ought to be — in Hell, tormented by great big poofter devils, and very active ones, not passive ones.

The wording seems to vary between reports. I assume they are different translations. This one is from the Times. Other reports are in the Guardian (and their opinion), Chortle (where I first found the story), and loads of others, including Zimbio, whose article has this to say:

Ratzinger does a lot of pontificating…

That’s true. I also hear he’s Catholic.

They think it’s okay to punish people for mocking a bigot in a frock. Perhaps more worryingly, they also think it’s okay to punish people for mocking their President — that must make politics a risky game. It is no surprise that this law was signed by His Excellency Benito Mussolini, Head of Government, Duce of Fascism, and Founder of the Empire (really, that’s what he called himself).

So that’s why they’re wrong. You just wait until you hear why they’re stupid…

The July rally [at which Guzzanti made the offending joke] was called to protest against alleged interference by the Vatican and the Catholic Church in Italian affairs, from abortion to gay rights, but also to attack the Prime Minister for passing “ad personam” laws to protect his own interests and avoid prosecution on corruption allegations.

So your plan is to arrest anyone who points it out under “ad hominem” laws? That will work.

Three years ago Ms Guzzanti released a widely praised film, Viva Zapatero!, about the suppression in 2003 of her late night show RAIot in which she had satirised the Italian Prime Minister. At the 2005 Venice International Film Festival Viva Zapatero! was given an ovation.

Just you watch how well that works.

This month, I’m awarding the title of Crackpot to Father Sean McDonagh, and to the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, whoever they might be. He has decided, based on scripture, that you can’t use GM wheat for the Eucharist. Which is fair enough, you might think, but… well, there’s really very little non-GM wheat available. It’s about the most artificial plant there is. Even if God created man, man created things like poodles and bread-wheat.

But even so, all this was done before Jesus supposedly lived, so let’s grant him that God picked a man-made crop, and let’s even grant him literal trans-substantiation (albeit because it’s irrelevant rather than because it’s even remotely reasonable). The mental acrobatics he must have done before this made sense are enough to win him the award:

Fr McDonagh quotes from Canon Law 924, section two, which stipulates: “the bread must be wheaten only, and recently made, so that there is no danger of corruption.”

But he says that genetically-engineered wheat is not “made solely from wheat” because of protein added to make it resistant to a weed killer. “For example, people who suffer coeliac disease are unable to absorb gluten, a protein found in wheat. Eating even small amounts of wheat can make them ill.

“In recent decades, it has been possible to extract the gluten from wheaten bread so that people can eat bread without endangering their health. Despite the fact that gluten-wheat poses a health threat, which can often be serious, the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith stated in a reply in 1982 that, ‘the local Ordinary could not permit a priest to consecrate special gluten-free hosts for the communion of coeliacs’,” writes Fr McDonagh.

So your theory is that God, in his infinite wisdom and compassion, gave loads of people a medical condition that means they can’t eat wheat, and then required them to eat wheat every Sunday? That regular wheat can literally become the body of Jesus but GM and gluten-free wheat can’t? What part of that is supposed to make sense?

And even ignoring all of the above, basically allow him to invent his own reality, he’s still wrong — because gluten-free wheat is “made solely from wheat”, just with a bit taken out, and the whole analogy is nonsense in any case.

How shitty a person do you have to be to expect people to eat poison for God?

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.

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.