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I am a big fan of the “intelligent design” teaching packs that the god-botherers are sending out to our schools. I hope the government makes them compulsory. They will be incredibly useful in teaching kids the single most important lesson that anyone learns in school.

That lesson is, obviously, that adults in positions of power and responsibility often talk the most extraordinary bullshit.

read the rest…

On the matter of Alan Johnson whirling on a six-pence over the issue of faith schools and their (non-)admittance of heathen students, we have this from the Education Secretary:

We’ve made enough progress through the voluntary route that we don’t need the blunt instrument of legislation.

We don’t need the blunt instrument of legislation? If you’ll permit me, that’s a bit fucking rich.

Many will be saddened to hear of the death of Faith School Quotas, killed whilst travelling in a government vehicle last night.

read the rest…

I’m a big fan of small acts of unsolicited kindness to and from strangers. I like good manners and, being an old fashioned sort, I also enjoy chivalry and not just because I fancy having a natty suit of armour and a warcharger. In short, I despise beastliness.

So, being of good breeding and while dropping my daughter off at school the other day, I held the gate open for one of the mothers. I didn’t catch a thank you from her which isn’t unusual - 90% of the parents with children at the school are pig ignorant after all.

What was different, however, is that the mother was wearing the niqab. And do you know, like Jack Straw, I realised that the garment can be a barrier to communication; the mother may well have smiled gratefully and said an unostentatious ‘thank you’, both niceties being disguised by the niqab.

Where Jack, a man with evidently such thin skin and delicate sensibilities that it remains a wonder how he ever summoned the courage to shake the hand of Robert Mugabe or flog weapons across the globe, evidently frets about this kind of thing, on further consideration I realised there is in fact an upside. Whereas I would have mentally added a non-niqab wearing parent displaying such behaviour to my list of enemies, on this occasion I didn’t.

The mother may have said thank you, she may not have. That being the case, I’d like to posit a new theory based on the famous thought experiment, Schrödinger’s cat.

I know for a fact that 90% of the non-niqab wearing parents in the schoolyard, knowing neither the cost nor value of civility (low and high, respectively), are ill-bred boors deserving of a size nine up the backside and capable of spoiling my mood. Under the terms of McKeating’s Niqab, however, just as the physicist’s feline was simultaneously both alive and dead, so a niqab-wearing mother is both polite and friendly and rude and stand offish. Or, for those readers of lower intelligence, much like a box that could be holding either £50,000 or one penny.

In this state of uncertainty, I am neither able to condemn the mother along with the rest nor gather her to my bosom as I have those showing themselves worthy of my esteem. My mood is neither spoiled nor elevated and a sense of benign ambivalence is maintained until further evidence is presented. A synthesis - a Third Way, if you will - is reached, while achieving a state of being that is quintessentially British.

What could be more modern than that? The conclusion that this new theory arrives at is surely, in Britain today, we should decide to refuse The Banker’s* offer.

*Popular rhyming slang.

Parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

(Via Pond.)

I believe these are the correct positions for progressive politics in the modern era. But if others feel they’re not the right policies, and some clearly do, let us debate them openly and candidly.

Tony Blair, ‘No more coded critiques - let’s have an open debate on where we go next‘

This is not an abstract discussion. It is one which touches upon the preservation of the values and freedoms. I look forward to that debate with you.

John Reid, ‘Security, freedom and the protection of our values‘.

I believe it is time now to engage in a new and honest debate about integration and cohesion in the UK.

Ruth Kelly, launching the Commission on Integration and Cohesion.

I’ve asked this before, but where is the forum for these debates? What are the formal mechanisms? Can I join in? I’m not the only one to notice.

(more…)

British National Party: BNP at Christian ‘Stop Springer’ meeting (Google News link)

There then followed a shared prayer led by Roy Beaumont of “Prayer for the City”, who had previously highlighted the reasons why Christians find the “musical” so offensive. He was followed, in addressing the gathering, by Stephen Green of Christian Voice.

…

As has been previously stated by Plymouth BNP had this “musical” been deemed in any way blasphemous, or insulting, to Muslims for instance, then Plymouth City Council would have moved Heaven and Earth to have it stopped. At the very least they would have threatened to withhold future funding from the Barbican theatre. The fact that they have done nothing, and clearly intend doing nothing, just reinforces the point that Christians are an underclass in the pro-Islam, Labour controlled, city.

Telegraph, Jan 1: Christians to sue BBC over Springer show ‘blasphemy’

Admitting that his organisation had published private contact details, Mr [Stephen] Green said: “It reflects that we have no confidence in the current channels of complaint. These people are public figures and the information is in the public domain.

“The BBC would not have done this if it had been Muslims or Sikhs, but because we are Christians we are fair game.”

WARNING: Fun being had by someone on Planet Earth

Well, consider my goat well and truly got. Sainsburys and Woolworths have withdrawn Jerry Springer: The Opera on DVD from sale after complaints from a “a tiny fringe Christian group”. (via Bloggerheads). MediaWatchWatch are pointing the finger at everyone’s favourite bigots, Christian Voice. Sounds about right. There’s no smoke without fire from book burners after all.

Remember those heady days after July 7 and the stoicism showed by this Bulldog Nation (or whatever shorthand the papers coined for ease of consumption)? I thought we weren’t in the business of letting fundamentalists dictate how we live our lives and what we read and watch in our own homes, theatres, and cinemas. I thought we weren’t going to give in to threats and blackmail. It would seem we are after all.

Along with other people, I sent a statement of intent of my own to Sainsburys and Woolworths:

Dear Sir

In view of your craven bending to the whims fundamentalists and banning the sale of the “Jerry Springer: The Opera” DVD in your stores, I shall be taking my custom elsewhere from now on and urging my friends and family to do the same.

Yours faithfully

I wonder if Lord Sainsbury is as malleable on other issues. Apparently his supermarket empire only needed ten complaints from the Fun Police in order to censor the products it sells. It would seem that if you can provide (or threaten to provide) a PR disaster, the world is your oyster.

Maybe 25 (say) complaints or so from other “pressure groups” and Lord Sainsbury might have a word with the Prime Minister about banning extraordinary renditions or ID cards. Or Jamie Oliver.

So who’s going to bring Stephen Green and his grotty little fundamentalist band to heel? Should it be down to the Christian community just as the Muslim community have been urged to rein in their own fundamentalists? Regardless of whether they’re involved or even care? If you’re in the club don’t you bear some reponsibility for the conduct of the other members?

Shouldn’t we get Prince Charles to announce that “every true Christian” should root out the extremists and declare that “some may think this cause is Christianity. It is anything but. It is a perversion of traditional Christianity”? Or are such exhortations addressed beyond the pale?

I don’t mean to equate Stephen Green and his fundamentalists with Muslim terrorists. Oh, hang on, I do. Green and his ilk have taken the message of Christianity, twisted it, and are now attempting to force their own morality and values on the rest of us by use of threats and blackmail. And with every little victory they’ll swell a little more and look for another challenge. Once this battle’s won, there’ll be another, and their cry go up, “Remember Jerry Springer!”

UPDATE: A reply from Woolworths:

Dear Justin,

Thank you for your e-mail.

Woolworths is not a censor and does not wish to act as one. Like any other retailer, it is guided by government legislation with regard to film certification.

However, we also listen to our customers and their feedback. On this occasion we have received numerous complaints and it is clear to us that our customers would prefer us not to stock this product.

As a result it has been removed from sale.

Regards

xxxxxxxx
Customer Support Advisor

Which seems to be remarkably similar, nay identical, to replies that other people have received. It’s like I said, cut’n'pasting if fair enough if you’re not a prole.

Now, how to frame the reply…?

Woolworths is not a censor and does not wish to act as one.

Why did you then?

[I]t is clear to us that our customers would prefer us not to stock this product

Unless they’ve canvassed every single Woolworths customer, that would appear to be untrue. I’m a Woolworths customer and I would prefer them to stock this product. It would have surely been more accurate to state:

[I]t is clear to us that our Christian fundamentalist customers would prefer us not to stock this product.

It would be very interesting to see what form these “complaints” took. Were they really just complaints or were there threats of picketing and demonstrations? Something just doesn’t add up here. Why would two large companies grab their ankles like this unless their PR (and by extension profits) were at stake? It now seems likely Woolworths have received at least as many email complaining about the ban and yet they are still sending out the stock response.

Blogging really is the wrong game. I think it’s time to form a vicious, small-minded pressure group of my own and get what I want that way. The “I know what’s best for you and I’m going to make damn sure you get it” lobby is on the march…

UPDATE 6/12: The Smoking Gun:

Stephen Green, the organisation’s national director, said the group had recently managed to stop Sainsbury’s from stocking videos of the opera.

(Via Tim)

In other news: New Orleans got what it deserved, say “Christians”.

Anybody here think the accession of Joseph Ratzinger to the papacy is a good thing? In rejecting the unity candidate in favour of the continuity candidate the papal conclave have condemned yet more people to misery and death.

Having said that, it’s not as if Ratzinger didn’t warn us. Here’s what he had to say in God and the World: A Conversation with Peter Seewald:

Today what people have in view is eliminating suffering from the world. For the individual, that means avoiding pain and suffering in whatever way. Yet we must also see that it is in this very way that the world becomes very hard and very cold. Pain is part of being human. Anyone who really wanted to get rid of suffering would have to get rid of love before anything else, because there can be no love without suffering, because it always demands an element of self-sacrifice, because, given temperamental differences and the drama of situations, it will always bring with it renunciation and pain.

Anyone who really wanted to get rid of suffering would have to get rid of love before anything else. The proponent of this dangerous, disgusting horseshit is now leader of the world’s 1.1 billion Catholics. Good luck guys, sounds like you’re going to need it.

He’s been called “the Panzer Cardinal” - what a delightful image. His stint in the Hitler Youth clearly gave him the taste for the genocide his ultra-Conservative diktats have caused and will continue to cause. Still, to get rid of suffering is to get rid of love. The new Benedict XVI must love his flock so very, very much.

In fact Benedict XVI loves all kinds of people - particularly homosexuals (”an intrinsic moral evil“), children abused by paedophile priests (”Ratzinger wrote that pedophile cases were subject to pontifical secrecy and that only priests should handle such cases“), AIDS-ravaged Africa (”no condoms, keep it zipped up” - or words to that effect) and women (”You can’t have women priests because Christ had a johnson” - I paraphrase somewhat).

As someone who shook the disease of my Catholicism (along with theism in general) a long time ago now, I can really only shake my head, keep fingers crossed and keep reminding myself that at least I still believe all men are brothers, worthy of life, dignity and respect. It’s not as if I can join the Party and try to bring change from within.

It’s been said already that, at 78, Ratzinger is an interim figure. But as a bridgehead to what? He caused enough damage from the shadows under the previous pope. It’s to be wondered what he’ll feel himself capable of now the shackles are off and he has the papacy to himself. And what legacy will he leave? Plenty more souls gathered unto God and precious else.

He’s railed against the rise in secularisation particularly in Europe but how he’s supposed to be a figure to rally disaffected Catholics is anybody’s guess.

(Jim Bliss has more. At least Jim made the best use of papal infallibility, while he was its custodian, we’re likely to see this side of Judgement Day.)

I went on a pilgramage to see the Pope when he visited the UK in 1982. I was 11. Heaton Park near Manchester was the venue. It meant spending a freezing night camped in the open and then baking hours in the sun before the Pontiff’s arrival. It certainly was a day for wonders and visions. My mother collapsed with heat exhaustion just as the Pope arrived. I was dehydrated to the point that I hallucinated that the giant stage in the distance was the fireplace at home and I was in fact lying on my back on the living room carpet being lulled off to sleep by the sonorous tones of God’s man on Earth. Given that the best view of him we got was of a white dot on the horizon, I’m pretty sure my addled brain was telling me I’d have been better off at home watching the whole shebang on the telly.

It’s probably too soon after John Paul II’s death to expect much more than anodyne tributes and platitudes from the mainstream news coverage. More level-headed analysis will be conducted after the immediate mourning it seems.

It was also foolish to expect much from the great and the good. Bono, never one to miss an opportunity to make a fool of himself with a honking banality, described the Pope as “best front man” the Roman Catholic Church ever had. This after his description of Blair and Brown as the “Lennon and McCartney of global development“, pretty much makes Bono the Eddie “The Eagle” Edwards of analogy and metaphor.

The Prime Minister postponing the announcement of the election for 24 hours was a good one as well. Think of it less of a mark of respect and more of a recognition that the news cycle is out of New Labour’s control for the next 48 hours. Still, no harm done, and it should go down well with those Catholic voters still willing to forgive a Christian premier’s flexible interpretation of the sixth commandment.

My disenchantment with my Catholicism was in direct correlation with the awakening of my political principles. I remember an RE lesson when I was 15 and being told that babies that aren’t baptised before they die aren’t permitted into heaven. I remember being infuriated by the injustice and lack of logic. And it was downhill from there.

JPII was certainly a Pope to offend a then fledgling bleeding heart liberal and nascent athiest like me. He didn’t do much more to assauge me later on either. For the Catholic Church to condemn the use of condoms, and even to spread misinformation about their use, in an era of HIV/AIDS is desperately immoral. The debacle over the handling of paedophile priests destroyed any moral monopoly on homosexuality and a woman’s right to choose the Church could lay claim to. Pretty much any of the bete noires of the Church are fiercely guarded totems to us on the liberal left. Its cavalier handling of damaged children - coupled with a wider autocratic failure or unwillingness to grasp the realities of a late 20th century world - made damn sure the likes of me were never going to take lecture on morality from the Church ever again.

“Nothing more defines a man as his passing” has been a cliche overused in the last 24 hours. And yet, for all my liberal principles and militant athiestic thunder, I couldn’t but help but feel desperately sad for the Pope as he faded away - a vestige of my Catholicism or just a reaction of the morality many in the Church would deny we athiests possess? I know that’s not the way I want me or my family to go - spread out for the world to see, your most intimate ailments examined as if you were a dissected frog. Even I would have spared him that final indignity. For all the pain and suffering I believe his papacy brought to the world, I hoped his passing was eased with some soporific.

And he still had the final cosmic joke to come, a joke whose punchline none of us will ever see. A cruel joke perpetrated on believers to make them feel better about life being a struggle, sometimes brutal and painful. The Pope closed his eyes for the final time on this Earth, solid in his belief that, when he opened them again, he would be in the Kingdom of Heaven.

But he didn’t open them again, did he?

BBC News: Church fights Da Vinci Code novel

“The book is everywhere. There is a very real risk that many people who read it will believe that the fables it contains are true.”

So there you have it. A poorly-written potboiler whose central premise is borrowed wholesale from another book - whose authors have been comprehensively debunked on several occasions as the victims of a convoluted hoax - is shaking the 2000 year-old Catholic Church to it’s very foundations. God forbid that the gullible and weak-minded will start believing fictions - who knows where it might lead.

Chicken Yoghurt: Blogger fights Bible novel

“The book is everywhere. There is a very real risk that many people who read it will believe that the fables it contains are true.”

I was going to launch into a long, ill-tempered rant about Cormac Murphy-O’Connor and how he’s one of the last people on Earth who should be lecturing about the welfare of children.

But the Honourable Fiend beat me to it.

In this instance, allowing himself to be dragged into the Tories election campaign, Murphy-O’Connor should realise he is nothing but a tool.

UPDATE: I suppose the law of averages dictates that it was bound to happen sooner or later: today is the day when I find myself in total agreement with David Aaronovitch.

An interesting article from Nick Cohen in the New Humanist on who humanists/secularists should vote for in the forthcoming election.

He says we should put our tick in the Lib Dem, Green or, amazingly, Tory box.

Cohen himself is voting Labour for a number of reasons including, rather perversely I thought, “as a protest against the failure of the opponents of the war against Iraq to show the smallest sign of solidarity with the victims of Saddam’s murderous regime”. A now familiar generalisation from him which, had he applied it to an ethnic minority, would have had him vociferously shouted down.

I’m a huge fan of Cohen’s, a journalist who did much to fire my own ambitions in that direction, but it’s odd to to hear him say he’s voting Labour after probably being responsible for encouraging large numbers of people to do the opposite.

But his tarring the whole of the anti-war Left with the brush of deserting the Iraqi people wore thin quite a while ago as well. It’s a simplistic if-you’re-against-us-your-for-them “argument” more worthy of those, like Blair and Bush, frightened of intellectual engagement. Particulary as, as far as I am aware, Cohen has yet to address in any of his columns the unmitigating disaster post-war Iraq has become. Even a New Labour lickspittle like David Aaronovitch has made half-hearted attempts at reconciling his pre-war, pro-war stance with the post-war reality.

Unfortunately, like many on the pro-war Left, it seems, Cohen’s quite happy to count Saddam’s corpses but not Bush’s and Blair’s.

There’s a lot of fuss at the minute about many men of God, responsible for spreading His message of love and tolerance around the world, who say homosexuals are second class to those of us who like to pleasure the people we like by putting our penises in a different orifice.

In a world of war, poverty, disease and intolerance, it seems - to me - a fairly strange thing to get steamed up about.

My feelings on the subject are expressed by the only imaginary authority on Earth worth giving a damn about. Ladies and gentlemen, President Josiah “Jed” Bartlet.

Bartlet: I like how you call homosexuality an abombination.

Jenna Jacobs: I don’t say homosexuality is an abomination, Mr. President, the Bible does.

Bartlet: Yes, it does. Leviticus.

Jenna Jacobs: 18:22.

Bartlet: Chapter and verse. I wanted to ask you a couple of questions while I have you here. I’m interested in selling my youngest daughter into slavery as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. She’s a Georgetown sophmore, speaks fluent Italian, always cleared the table when it was her turn. What would a good price for her be? While thinking about that, can I ask another? My Chief of Staff Leo McGarry insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly says he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself or is it OK to call the police? Here’s one that’s really important because we’ve got a lot of sports fans in this town: touching the skin of a dead pig makes one unclean. Leviticus 11:7. If they promise to wear gloves, can the Washington Redskins still play football? Can Notre Dame? Can West Point? Does the whole town really have to be together to stone my brother John for planting different crops side by side? Can I burn my mother in a small family gathering for wearing garments made from two different threads? Think about those questions, would you?

“Christians” blackmail cancer charity.