Muslims’ zero tolerance

A poll suggests that British Muslims have zilch tolerance for gay sex.

Pink News tells us of a Gallup poll that “found that not one of the 1,001 British Muslims interviewed believed homosexual acts were morally acceptable”.

Germany’s and France’s Muslim populations are more tolerant:

In comparison to British Muslims, 35 per cent of French Muslims and 19 per cent of German Muslims did not have moral objections to homosexual acts.

That still leaves 65 per cent of French Muslims and 81 per cent of German Muslims who do have such objections. And those proportions are high.

Christians are far more tolerant, it seems, and fall into line with the general public:

Fifty-eight per cent of the general British public said they thought homosexuality was not morally wrong, compared with 68 per cent of Germans.

French respondents were the most liberal, with 78 per cent of the general public saying it was not morally wrong. According to the survey, the opinions of Christians differed little from the views of the general public.

The survey’s authors are quoted in Pink News as concluding:

Some researchers point out that the greatest differences between Muslims and westerners lie more in eros than demos. In other words, the Muslim–west gap rests on differences in attitudes toward sexual liberalisation and gender issues rather than democracy and governance.

This theory implies that the west speaks with one voice on issues of morals, tolerance, and sexual freedom. Furthermore, this line of argument contends that this unified system of western values represents the logical progression in all civilized, modern societies and Muslims are expected to embrace such liberal views, if they are to live in the west.

That’s right, yes. Nothing wrong with that. If they don’t like the way the West runs its affairs in terms of sexuality, they can go somewhere that is less accommodating. There are plenty of Muslim theocracies and near-theocracies, if that way of life suits them better.

Yes, leaving is easier said than done. Which leaves them with one option: some people are gay – including Muslims; get used to it!

Blasphemy proposal raises Irish ire

There’s some anti-religious rhetoric coming out of Ireland at the moment. It’s all come about because of a proposal there to put blasphemy on the statute book, and freethinking types don’t like it.

Last week we reported on one writer’s view that what’s sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander. In other words, if you want a blasphemy law that denies people freedom of speech, then you should expect religion to be denied freedom of speech, too.

Now we get David Adams, also writing in the Irish Times, who says, unequivocally, “There is no such thing as a Divine Being. So get a life, Dermot, or at least stop trying to foist your beliefs on everyone else.”

The Dermot he addresses is Dermot Ahern, the Republic’s justice minister, whose crazy idea this blasphemy lark is.

Before he gets to the more serious stuff, he has a bit of fun by saying he’d prefer to go to Hell then Heaven if these places existed, because, “What could possibly be worse than having to spend eternity in the company of ayatollahs, archbishops, pontiffs, preachers, and their legions of glass-eyed, po-faced acolytes?”

He says later:

Religious fanaticism is on the march, beginning to reassert itself, and determined to drag us back to pre-enlightenment times. I’ve no wish to cause unnecessary panic but if I were a “non-Catholic” living in the Republic I’d be keeping a packed suitcase handy in case things turn nasty.

His penultimate paragraph refers to the kowtowing to superstition by politicians (much as we find here in the UK):

Still, it isn’t church leaders we should be most worried about, but rather those true believers within the laity who hold powerful political positions and wait patiently until they judge that the time is right to do His will. For Dermot Ahern that time has come.

Then he refers to the concepts of Up There and Down There, saying, “The difference between Heaven and Hell? Stand by, we’re about to find out.”

In the middle somewhere, we get references to genital mutilation, repression of women and forced marriage, along with Pope Ratzinger's hatred of homosexuality.

Full of Christian hate

The online Christian Today reports that as many as one-fifth of all Church of Scotland (Kirk) clergy have signed an online petition against the appointment of an openly gay minister.

We reported in April on the Rev. Scott Rennie, who’s open about his sexuality and has a male partner.

There’s concern, says Christian Today, citing the BBC, that, if the Kirk doesn’t overturn Rennie’s appointment, “there could be a mass walkout by members of the Church”.

This band of bigots have signed a petition, which reads:

We urge the Assembly to support the position of those who stood to defend Christian orthodoxy in Aberdeen Presbytery, and ensure instead that the Church will apply and assert in practice its clear doctrinal position on all matters of marriage and human sexuality, by refusing to condone homosexual practice in general, and among its leaders in particular.

So far, 230 Kirk ministers, 2,000 of its members and 3,000 other church members worldwide have signed the petition.

All doing their Christian duty of loving their neighbour, then.

BBC Scotland says that, when Rennie was appointed minister of Queen’s Cross Church in Aberdeen, members of his church said that they were happy with the appointment, and that the national church should welcome a broad range of lifestyles and beliefs.

But that’s not good enough for the bigots.

One of those organising the petition against the appointment was the Rev. Steven Reid of Crossford and Kirkfieldbank Church in Lanarkshire. He said that, while he would stay within the Church of Scotland, many others probably wouldn’t.

“The minute you’re talking about the division of a church over areas that are deeply held on both sides of the discussion, you realise there’s the possibility of that division happening and you can’t rule it out,” he said.

There’s an evangelical group within the Kirk laughingly called Forward Together, which, as you would expect, is at the forefront of the chorus of bigotry. It has said in a statement on its website:

Mr Rennie has openly stated that he is intending taking his male partner with him to live in the manse. [Horror of horrors!]

This has caused enormous tremors [God’s tectonic plates a-trembling?] throughout the Church as it is aggressively taking the debate on homosexuality onto a new level.

Forward Together is deeply concerned over this development and asks for Christians to pray for wisdom for those in Aberdeen Presbytery and the wider courts of the Church.

We cherish the peace and unity of the Church and feel this new development will seriously undermine both.

How can you cherish peace and set out to wreck it just because you hate poofs, you bunch of snivelling morons?

Dying with dignity – and those who want to prevent it

There’s talk of suicide in Brighton, UK, today. But there are those who’d like to stop it.

Yesterday, it was Bournemouth’s turn, when “euthanasia expert” Philip Nitschke chose the town as the first stop on a UK tour championing assisted suicide.

“The town’s great and good did their best to keep him at bay,” says the Guardian, “and immigration officials pounced when he arrived at Heathrow airport. But today [Tuesday] at a hotel in Bournemouth, Philip Nitschke, also known as Dr Death, calmly explained to 100 middle-aged and elderly people how, if they chose, they could take their own lives.”

Known to whom as Dr Death? Known only to his critics, I assume, but we are not told.

One person who will be at the Brighthelm Centre at 1 p.m. today is Barry Duke, editor of the Freethinker and its blog. He writes:

Let me assure readers that I am in no way suicidal – but I, alongside around 80 percent of the British population, support the legalisation of assisted suicide, and I passionately believe that adults of a sound mind should be allowed to attend any gathering where the issue can be discussed in a dispassionate, rational way.

But Duke talks of one Dr Peter Saunders, general secretary of Christian Medical Fellowship, who says, “We’d like to see these talks stopped. He is effectively offering a loaded gun to people who need support.”

He wants to see the talks stopped. He knows, presumably, that Nitschke won’t be breaking the law and handing out lethal substances. So it’s just the talks he wants to stop. He doesn’t want people even to talk about it.

Nitschke makes the point that suicide is legal, so where’s the harm in telling people about it? “They simply cannot get information and they become more desperate, and desperate people do desperate things,” he says.

The Guardian quotes Father Anthony Pennicott, of the Sacred Heart Roman Catholic church, who says, “This is not the answer. The issue should be debated in a more sane, orderly manner.”

Well, of course, the church is always wheeled on, as if anyone speaking on its behalf could possibly have a rational opinion.

A priest may well have an informed opinion as a person, but it’s up to him or her to speak from a different “pulpit”, as it were. Bringing on the religionists every time assisted suicide – or suicide at all – is mentioned is just crap journalism, as is the biased, clichéd headline, worthy of the Star, the Express or the Sun: “Dr Death” gives right-to-die lesson to seaside retirement town.

One chap who attended the Bournemouth event, Edward Gwinnell, who’s 79, tells the Guardian, “I wanted to learn more about Exit. It’s designed to get you a peaceful exit from this life. I don’t want to degenerate into an unthinking mess who needs constant care and attention. I want to be able to make my exit with dignity. Human beings have the right to the truth and discussion. We should be able to discuss things. It is a country of free speech.”

Well, that last sentence is debatable when people are barred from the country for wanting to speak and people are afraid to criticise religious hatred when it’s practised by certain religions, but there you go. He makes good points.

The irrational reaction of the religious to any talk of euthanasia is usually knee-jerk. There will be abuses, they say. Well, of course there will be abuses, just as there are abuses of all kinds of laws.

It’s up to legislators to find ways to stop abuses, and – working with responsible, freethinking doctors and other healthcare professionals – help people to make informed decisions about their exit from life and then to be able to carry it out safely and with dignity.

I’m always reminded of an excellent dystopian sci-fi movie from 1973 called Soylent Green, in which global warming and overpopulation are on everyone’s mind – much as now.

Sol Roth (Edward G Robinson), an elderly police researcher, decides – for reasons I won’t go into at risk of spoiling it for anyone yet to see it, except to say that, in his case, the choice wasn’t motivated by ageing or incurable illness – to end his life. But he has a wonderful, dedicated government facility to help him to do it.

“There,” says the Wikipedia entry on the film, “he is taken to a comfortable bed, is given a poison-laced beverage, and is shown panoramic views of an unspoiled pristine Earth as he dies.”

And I can vouch for the fact that he is depicted as dying peacefully and with dignity. (And the music he chose, if memory serves, was “Morning” from Peer Gynt – bit of a cliché, but kinda nice.)

It’s nonetheless a touching scene, and shows how things could be if only the cling-to-life-at-all-costs-because-God-says-so brigade would just clam up, or those in authority would stop listening to them.

Our Lady of the Griddle

Oh, gawdelpus! Here we go! It’s Rorschach time again.

Every so often someone sees something resembling an allegedly divine face, whether it’s in brickwork, a hamburger or, in the latest case, a griddle in a restaurant in the border town of Calexico in California.

The story appears in several places, but my source is the Los Angeles Times, which says:

A cook at Las Palmas restaurant was the first to see the image.

“She started to cry and didn’t want to clean the griddle anymore,” said Brenda Martinez, who manages the family-owned restaurant.

The griddle has been taken off the stove and is now displayed in a room behind the kitchen that is quickly filling up with rosaries, flowers, votive candles and other offerings left by visitors from the Imperial Valley and from Mexicali across the border.

My first question with these things is always this: how the hell do they know what the Virgin Mary or any other allegedly historical figure looked like?

My second question is this: how the hell do we know it’s not (a) a hoax or (b) a means of getting thousands of column inches of publicity – especially since anything Mexican may be just a tad unfashionable in these days of the overplayed “pandemic” of swine flu?

Another thing to bear in mind is that the human brain makes sense of random squiggles, scratches and swirls. Have you never seen an image in the clouds? In tealeaves (I suppose some people still brew using leaf tea rather than teabags)?

Don’t psychologists use the Rorschach test linked to above – the so-called inkblot test – to elicit subconscious information from clients?

Perhaps swine flu has affected their brains.

Unlucky thirteen

For a list of countries that are deemed the worst offenders against religious freedom, you need only look at this CNN article.

There’s the main list of thirteen and a “watch list”.

It won’t take long for you to establish just how many of them are Islamic.

Of Pakistan, for instance, it says (referring to Taliban-inspired extremists):

In the areas they already control, these groups are imposing draconian restrictions on human rights and religious freedom and engaging in brutal acts against individuals, particularly women and local police, who refused to accede to their repressive policies.

We’ve blogged about Pakistan very recently.

You can read a whole load of stories about the scum who make up the Taliban here.

Raising questions about charities

Guest post by Stuart Hartill

I had a positively surreal experience recently. In effect, I was barred from the local branch AGM of Amnesty International for exercising the right to free speech.

It happened because our Amnesty group meets in the One World Centre, which started as a joint initiative by local campaign groups (Oxfam, Amnesty, Friends of the Earth, etc.).

It appears an ideal “rainbow coalition”, but sadly the involved groups are dominated by Christians who can’t see how a crossover between church and “secular” community work shuts out non-churchgoers. They also assume that membership of one group implies support of all, which rules out critical discussion of individual organisations or policies (e.g. Tearfund or CAFOD).

Another problem is the obsession with “positive thinking”. The OWC have a bit of a party line on this, which has a knock-on effect on our Amnesty campaigning. Their staff only like lightweight, uncontroversial cases – no politicos, no LGBTs, nobody who has been tortured, nobody facing execution. That would be “negative” and “might put the public off”.

The other irony is that, when another secular committee member stepped down, I briefly joined the OWC management committee myself to try to broaden the representative views. But I quickly felt I was there to rubberstamp predecided policies, not ask questions or put other views. After being unable to interrupt the “feel-good” chatter and ask even basic questions at one “blue-sky thinking” all-dayer and another rambling evening meeting, I just gave up.

But I do raise those questions, among many others, on my blog – questions about dubious evangelical activity in Africa, or concerns of East European friends and relatives about the breakdown of civil society and the public sector caused by interfering Western faith-based charities.

It seems obvious to me to ask who vets overseas-aid applications and how. Who ensures our government makes informed decisions, rather than secretive deals with lobbyists?

It is also obvious to suggest people check out “charities” properly instead of dropping guilt money that might subsidise hate into a tin.

Sadly, the OWC seem to take this as an insult, rather than an honest attempt to set people thinking about world issues. So when, as publicist for the Amnesty group, I circulated notice of the AGM the OWC staff refused to open the building if I attended. Our treasurer (another OWC committee member) was told to collect the key beforehand and put it through the letterbox afterwards.

I learnt all this via a phone call from the chairman two days before the AGM. By implication, the price of future cooperation with the OWC was that I should make a 70-mile round trip merely to be told to apologise and censor myself over a matter that doesn’t even involve Amnesty, which isn’t a charity and never takes funds from any government. I see little enough of my family, so I took a very pleasant “day off” with my wife and daughter instead.

But, as an Amnesty member who on principle always campaigns against censorship of evangelical dingbats I would cross the road to avoid in person, I loved the irony.

Who'd be female under Islam?

“Who'd be female under Islamic law?” asks Muslim writer Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in today’s (UK) Independent.

Who indeed?

Alibhai-Brown presents us with sickening examples of abuses of women in Islamic countries, including the murder of Ayman Udas, a singer, killed for singing – many of them sanctioned by law.

She says she is a Muslim, yet cites a number of things she does that Muslims just don’t allow, such as drinking alcohol and appearing in public with unrelated men. I’m not sure how she can claim to be a Muslim. Perhaps there’s some semantic sleight of hand going on here.

However, she goes on to talk of Pakistan, “the country that once elected a woman head of state”. She continues:

The divinely beautiful Swat Valley has, for reasons of political expediency, been handed over to the Taliban, and there they have blown up over a hundred schools for girls and regularly flog young females on the streets. The girls are shrouded and forbidden to scream because the female voice has the potential to arouse desire. Or pity perhaps.

Quite! What a sick bunch of scum the Taliban and their followers are! And this, don’t forget, is done in the name of their religion – a religion we in the West continue (not in all its manifestations, true) to kowtow to. In the case of politicians (most of them, most of the time, shabby, dodgy and second-rate), it amounts to votes; in the case of others, it’s usually a case of woolly-liberal, touchy-feely political correctness.

Alihbai-Brown is aware that these things lead to comments such as those in the paragraph above:

I am aware that my words will help confirm the pernicious prejudices that fester in the minds of those who despise Islam. Yet to conceal or excuse the violations would be to condone and encourage them.

But why “pernicious”? Why “prejudices”? We can see what’s going on in these benighted countries, assuming all the news media are not conducting one huge, elaborate conspiracy.

However, she continues to criticise, and, towards the end of the article, presents an infuriating scene that sums up how women are treated (and often allow themselves to be treated) by men who follow this poisonous belief system – and her example comes from here in dear old Blightly:

I look out of my study at the common and see a wife fully burkaed on a sunny day. She sits still. Her children and husband run around, laughing, playing cricket. She sits still, dead, buried, a ghost. She is complicit in her own degradation, as are countless others. Their acquiescence in a free democracy is a crime against their sisters who have no such choices in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

What is the British government doing to try to discourage this behaviour, and to encourage Muslim women – who, along with gays, are usually the first victims of toxic Islam – to rebel against this treatment and to end their own complicity in it?

Probably nothing at all.
__________

Related links:
The singer is dead, but the song remains
The day the music died
Cover-up

The singer is dead, but the song remains

Not a million miles away from the sentiments expressed in our last post comes news from Pakistan of a singer who’s been murdered.

By, allegedly, her brothers.

For singing.

It’s told in the Sunday Times, which talks of “a rising musical star [who] was allegedly shot dead by her own brothers in the conservative city of Peshawar in Pakistan last week after she had appeared on television”.

She was Ayman Udas, and the final song performed by her on screen “seems to have portended her death”, says The Times. It was called “I died but still live among the living, because I live on in the dreams of my lover”.

Udas, a divorced mother of two, had remarried ten days before she was killed.

Dr Frederick Ide of Radcliffe in the USA says in a comment below the online article:

Fundamentalist religions never tolerate dissent and play god. Not just with Islam, but Roman Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and the rest are determined to tell people how to live, think, act, and love. The enemy is religion, and thus another woman has been sacrificed on the altar of faith – a butchery.

__________

Related link:
The day the music died

The Age of reason

A world where an extreme faction of Islam wishes to put me and mine to the sword for my unbelief, and to shackle half the world for the crime of being born female. A world where an extreme faction of Christianity wants to throw away science for the sake of millenniums-old superstitions, and is prepared to kill in the name of life. A world where an extreme faction of Hinduism wishes to religiously purify India. A world where people are unashamedly trying to fulfil the biblical conditions for Armageddon.

Not a bad description of religion, is it? Oh, yes, I know there are nice people out there who believe they’re using their religion to be good and helpful, and many no doubt are.

But the bigger picture is the one described above in the Australian newspaper the Age.

I won’t quote too much, because it’s worth going to the article, but this paragraph is worth giving:

From the Egyptians enslaving the Israelites to Nero lighting the streets with burning Christians, from the slaughter of the Crusades to the bloodbath of India’s Partition, violence and religion have always gone hand in hand. And the record of societies governed by religious law, from the Aztecs to the Taliban, tells us that theocracy is a synonym for barbarity.

So the nice guys among religionists, the ones who would have no truck with the barbarity that religion can engender and would denounce even their own religion for the barbarities it has carried out in the past, really ought to be doing more if they want to continue to consider themselves the nice guys.

They could start with louder denunciations, then a mass exodus from the structured aspects of their religion. I’m sure there are plenty of Christians who don’t belong to any denomination.

Belief is entirely down to individuals, takes many forms and can sometimes be a good thing, but subscribing to and therefore supporting and legitimising a structured religion ought to get them examining their consciences.

Cover-up

Civil liberties types don’t always get it right, it seems.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) wants Muslim women to be allowed to hide their faces when giving evidence in court. That is their freedom, it says, seeming to ignore the freedom of others taking part in the proceedings to see just who is giving evidence, and to judge her veracity or mendacity by more than just her voice.

“Judges should not deny anyone access to justice because of his or her religion,” says Michael Steinberg, legal director for the ACLU of Michigan.

Steinberg says unions and other groups have asked the Supreme Court to add a sentence to the rule, saying “that no person shall be precluded from testifying on the basis of clothing worn because of a sincerely held belief”.

Well, I believe – sincerely – that it’s OK to wear a motorcycle helmet with tinted visor, OK? On second thoughts, I’ll go for Batman’s cowl.

Steinberg has also said that his request was signed by religious organisations, including the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, the American Jewish Congress and Michigan Conference of the United Church of Christ.

But, then, religious organisations would sign it, wouldn’t they? If there’s one thing religions do have in common, it’s a desire to thwart anything that prevents them from having to act according to the same rules and laws as others.

What sort of precedent does this type of thing set? What other “sincerely held” beliefs will be wheeled out when another law or ruling prevents members of the Deluded Herd from taking their bat home because the game isn’t going their way?

What’s sauce for the goose . . .

If you want a blasphemy law that denies people freedom of speech, then you should expect religion to be denied freedom of speech, too.

That seems to be the conclusion of John Waters, writing an opinion piece in the Irish Times today, on a suggestion that the ridiculous “crime” of blasphemous libel be brought onto the Irish statute book.

“[I]t is difficult to arrive at any insight into why the Minister for Justice has proposed the introduction of [this] new crime,” he says.

And he makes his case thus:

The right to give expression to the religious concept of reality itself depends on the right to freedom of expression. If we move to censor criticism or the satirising of religion, we move also to what will no doubt be deemed a trade-off: the complete removal of signs of religiosity from public view.

If the proposed legislation were to become law, it would become more difficult to argue with, for example, attempts to remove the Angelus from national radio and television, because the continuation of this tradition might then quite reasonably be deemed an unjust provocation to those whose dissent would no longer be a matter of freedom of choice, but a potential crime subject to draconian penalties.

Yup. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

And you might like to have a gander at this: it was “blasphemous libel”, not blasphemy itself, that did it for Gay News in England the 1970s, and you can see a series of articles relating to that case here.

“Faith” schools and sexuality: PTT’s letter to Balls

We were blogging the other day about how “faith” schools will be able to screw up gay kids’ lives by being allowed to tell them their sexuality is wrong. In fact, if they follow Catholic “teaching” on the subject, they’ll tell the kids that their sexuality is an “intrinsic moral evil”.

This, after all, was what Pope Ratzinger said in August 1986 (while he was still in charge of the Inquisition) in a document called “On the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons”. This is so reminiscent of the name of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, which was just the opposite. They say care and they mean hate. They don’t call it hate; they probably don’t even think they’re indulging in hate. But it’s hate. And it’s ugly.

Imagine being a nine- or ten- or whatever-year-old school pupil struggling to come to terms with your orientation in a world that in parts is still hostile towards homosexuality, and hearing that said of you!

Now, this blog’s parent organisation, the Pink Triangle Trust, has written to the Secretary for Children, Schools and Families, Ed Balls, saying that allowing religious schools to say homosexuality is evil is “unacceptable”.

Here is the letter, signed by my fellow blogger George Broadhead, who is the secretary of the Trust:

As a gay educational charity, we were shocked to learn that the new government plans to compel all schools to teach sex education will allow faith schools to educate pupils in line with their religious beliefs.

It seems that a get-out clause for faith schools will permit them to present sex education “in line with the context, values and ethos” of the schools and clearly this will permit them to tell pupils (in line with the teachings in their holy books) that lesbian and gay sexual relationships are morally wrong.

Homophobic bullying plagues the majority of our schools and shocking levels of bullying are meted out to school pupils and teachers who either are gay or perceived to be gay. That is the conclusion of a wide-ranging study carried by the gay equality organisation Stonewall. The study found that nearly two thirds of lesbian and gay pupils reported instances of homophobic harassment and significantly this figure jumps to 75% for those attending faith schools.

When this survey was issued, you yourself pledged to stamp out all forms of bullying in schools.

It is surely unacceptable that a large proportion of our schools should be allowed to tell their pupils that same-sex relationships are wrong with the inevitable consequence that anti-gay bullying will increase.

But religionists will want to put dogma first, people second.
__________

Related links:
Blessed bigotry
Tony Blair tells the Pope – you’re wrong on homosexuality

And pigs might fly

It’s amazing what you can “prove”. Swine flu, it appears, was foretold in the Koran. Straight up. No shit.

According to the Italian press agency Adnkronos:

The global spread of the deadly swine flu virus affirms Islam’s teachings and its holy book, the Koran, according to imam Amadia Rachid based in the Italian city of Salerno. “We believe that what is happening shows the truth of our faith,” said Algerian-born Rachid in an interview with Adnkronos International.

Pigs, you see, are considered unclean by Islam.

“Even Muslims who live in Italy are talking about swine flu at the moment,” Rachid is quoted as saying.

Most Muslims, he reckons, are not worried by the disease, because they don’t eat pork and don’t work with pig livestock. Quite how they know they’re not sharing a bus seat with someone who does work with porcine livestock isn’t explained.

“The Islamic faith doesn’t explain exactly why pigs should be considered unclean animals,” he said. “But it’s clear that, for most theologians, it is precisely to avoid the spread of disease that Islamic tradition tends to keep men away from pigs,” he added.

Clear? Clear to whom? Rachid?

“But many believe the disease confirmed the teaching of the Koran.”

How many believe this? Where’s your proof? And, even if you’re right, so what? They believe it because they all subscribe to the same crackpot belief system.

The news report says Rachid claims that scientific truths lie behind the “teachings” of the Koran.

This is almost a version of post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Picture this . . .

No, you’re not seeing things. The camera, as they say, cannot lie, and this picture says that Pink Triangle is the best blog in the blogosphere. There it is, right on the side of the now familiar “atheist bus”.

Actually, you can have a bit of fun by going to this link, and you’ll see what it’s all about.

Enjoy!

Today, children, we’re going to tell you how evil you are

If you’re a gay young person struggling with your sexuality in a hostile environment, start worrying. Your school – if it’s a “faith” school – could be allowed make your life a whole lot worse for you, and get away with it.

In the Guardian today (among others), we read that a government report says that “faith schools will [. . .] be free to preach against sex outside marriage and homosexuality, under government proposals”.

The plans to make personal, social and health education (PSHE) compulsory from the age of five, published yesterday, include a clause allowing schools to apply their “values” to the lessons and another allowing parents to opt their children out on religious grounds.

It means that all state secondaries in England – including faith schools – will for the first time have to teach a core curriculum about sex and contraception in the context of teenagers’ relationships, but teachers in religious schools will also be free to tell them that sex outside marriage, homosexuality or using contraception [is] wrong. Sexual health campaigners warned that such an approach could confuse teenagers, but Catholic schools welcomed the move.

Yes, Catholic schools would welcome the move. Catholics love to make people suffer. Catholics cause young people to commit suicide.

They believe they’re doing the right thing, of course, but, then, some of the most heinous atrocities in the history of the world were committed out of total sincerity. The fact is, the Catholic Church is an evil organisation that cares more about insentient embryos and uncontrolled, irresponsible procreation than it does about life – about God’s children, if you like (though I suspect most readers of this blog won’t see it that way).

Now we can have kids made to feel totally shitty about themselves, with the blessing of all: the government, the local education authority, the school governors, the school head and the teachers.

The Guardian story goes on:

An optional curriculum in secondaries covering sex, both homosexual and heterosexual relationships, and contraception will be made compulsory – previously schools had to teach only the fundamentals of reproduction, contraception and puberty in science lessons. A new curriculum for primary schools will include teaching five-year-olds about different kinds of relationships, managing their emotions and about physical changes to their bodies in childhood.

Faith schools will be allowed to deliver the lessons in line with the “context, values and ethos” of their religion, the report says. Parents will also retain the right to withdraw their child from sex education lessons, meaning some children will continue to miss out altogether.

And all in the name of religion. At this rate, we’ll be as backward as Islamic theocracies.

The day the music died

So centuries of musical heritage are gone, because religious scum have said so.

This is the sad situation in the Swat Valley, the newly Talibanised area of northwestern Pakistan.

“Musical expressions are completely banned and ruthlessly discouraged,” says Fremuse.org, which continues:

The few singers and musicians who remain in the area have shunned their music business and publically [sic] announced that from now onwards they will never indulge in the “un-Islamic” practice of singing. Taliban threats have forced popular singers such as Nazia Iqbal, Gulrez Tabbasum, Gulzar Alam and Shehensha Bacha to publically denounce music and join “Tablighi Jumat”, an Islamic movement that spreads Islamic teachings in different parts of Pakistan and internationally.

How sad! How utterly sad that people are allowing themselves to be swamped by this evil!

The estimated 500 music shops that earlier sold music CDs of all types have been either bombed or looted, and the owners were threatened of dire consequences if they violated Taliban code of morality.

At the same time, CDs and DVDs showing Taliban style “justice” are available in every nook and corner of the district. “People who earlier dealt in music CDs and videos are now selling Jihadi CDs,” says Sher Ali Shah, an NGO [nongovernmental organisation] worker in Mingora.

What a thoroughly sad part of the world to have to live in! Music hath charms, and all that. It’s been part of the human experience since there has been human experience.

But that’s not all. The website story – which talks of a valley “famous for its idyllic beauty, serene environment and centuries[-]old musical heritage” – goes on:

On 19 April, while addressing a large gathering, Maulana Sufi Muhammad, chief of the banned Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Muhammadi (Movement for the enforcement of Muhammadan Law) said that after 20 years of struggle his movement had succeeded to implement pure Islamic law in Malakand.

“Now we will focus on other areas and will bring every sphere of life under the injunctions of Islam,” he maintained. In Maulana Sufi Muhammad’s interpretation of Islam, music is strictly prohibited and source of all sins, and it is expected that the Taliban will now further intensify their campaign against music and singers.

Transforming cultural values

“They want to transform local cultural values. The future is bleak for singers and music lovers,” said Zafar Yousafzai, a political analyst based in Islamabad, adding that music has now died in the Swat valley which was once a valley of music, melodies and dances and a great seat of learning in liberal arts.

The capacity that some people have for making the lives of others supremely miserable in the name of religion never ceases to amaze.

My tweet lord

You know the leaders of the Deluded Herd are getting desperate when they actually catch up with the latest, street-credible, cool thing to do.

A few decades ago it was vicars on motorbikes. A few days ago we had a vicar on rollerblades – see Rolling in the aisles.

Now the flock are being told to tweet. For the uninitiated, that’s what you do on one of the newest of those social networking whatnots on the Interweb thing, Twitter. (We have Twitter updates in our sidebar, which also allow us to précis our last ten posts – handy, really.)

Anyway, I read on the BBC’s news website that a cardinal in Ireland is asking his flock to tweet a prayer.

“Make someone the gift of a prayer through text, Twitter or email every day,” says the head of the Roman Catholic Church in the Republic, Sean Brady.

But is the Lord going to be happy with a mere tweet? Aren’t we in danger of incurring his considerable wrath by dismissing his Word in a mere 140 characters?

Mind you, it opens up all kinds of possibilities, doesn’t it? Imagine if all the hot air religionists spout could be contained in just 140 characters.

On the Today programme, Thought for the Day could be performed in two seconds while anchor John Humphrys merely clears his throat for the next proper item.

Interviews with the obligatory churchmen at times of national mourning could be out of the way before you can reach for the TV remote.

“Well, Bishop Prong, how do you view today’s events?”

“Well, I'd just like to say that we in the church know that, in the goodness of his heart, God our merciful father, who moves in mysterious—”

“Thank you, Bishop. Finance news now, and . . .”

You can soon use up your 140 characters on Twitter, as anyone who’s used it will testify. I managed to squeeze the Lord’s Prayer into:

Our Dad, wot’s in Heaven, hallowed name, thy will be done, give us some bread today, forgive stuff, it’s your kingdom, Big Man, ever, amen.

And that’s without shortening words, and it includes my final full stop, and I have one character spare. Oh, I had to leave out the “lead us not into temptation bit”, but, hey, what’s left in life if you can’t succumb to a bit of temptation?

More kowtowing to Islamic lunacy

Let’s give a big round of applause to Lisa Ashton.

She was an air stewardess and was told that when visiting Saudi Arabia she had to wear a bin bag and walk behind male colleagues, even though it is quite legal not to do so.

She refused. She told her employer, BMI, to stuff its job right up its cargo hold. She’d been offered alternative flights, but that would have meant a hefty pay cut.

Why should she have to accept a pay cut as an alternative to bowing to the repressive customs of a backward country?

She lost her case at an industrial tribunal in Manchester, UK, when it ruled that there was no evidence that women would regard BMI’s requirements on wearing the abaya – a body-length piece of dignity-destroying cloth – and walking behind men as “placing them under any disadvantage”.

What?

There’s the disadvantage to her status as a human being for starters. The disadvantage to her dignity. The disadvantage to all employees of companies that have dealings in that benighted Islamic state, who could be told by their money-grabbing employers – totally lacking in balls – to conform to the lunacy.

I like – or, rather, don’t like – the way the Telegraph in the above linked-to story refers to Saudi Arabia as “conservative”. The word, in relation to Islam, is used as if we were meant to infer a bit of eccentricity that we must indulge.

Bollocks! It’s repressive. It’s ugly. It’s demeaning. It’s contumelious. It’s debasing and degrading. It’s all of these things, not just “conservative”!

Anyway, 37-year-old Ashton says she may now seek a judicial review of the decision. Knowing the tendency of officialdom to kowtow to Islam, though, she probably won’t get anywhere.

She’s not even getting support from her union, it seems. This is what the Telegraph says:

She was earning £15,000 a year and flying to India, the Caribbean and the United States from her base in Manchester but was horrified to read details of the regulations for staff working on the new route.

Staff were given abayas and required to wear them when leaving the aircraft.

A document circulated to staff said: “It is expected that female crew members will walk behind their male counterparts in public areas such as airports no matter what rank.”

Miss Ashton, a practising Christian, was advised by union officials that the abaya was considered part of the uniform and she could face disciplinary action if she did not wear it.

Why isn’t her union fighting for her? Or is it? The story doesn’t say. But the use of the word advised suggests that the union told her not to rock the boat.

If so, is this what trade unions have come to in this country? Why isn’t it flying the flag for equality and for Lisa Ashton?

Countering the bullshit

Well, they can’t say they haven’t been asking for it.

There could well be a counter to enforced religion in British schools, if an organisation backed by Professors A C Grayling, the philosopher, and Richard Dawkins, the biologist, is a success.

According to the UK’s Telegraph, atheists are “targeting schools” in a campaign to challenge “Christian societies, collective worship and religious education”.

The way it is worded by Jonathan Wynne-Jones, the Telegraph’s religious affairs correspondent, is indicative of criticism, as if this countermeasure against brainwashing were an all-out assault with Scuds and tanks and AK-47s in every school playground and on every college campus.

I may be wrong (and he does quote the nontheist side in his piece), but why does he have to say “targeting schools”? If they’re about giving an alternative to the religious indoctrination that’s aimed at school pupils, of course they’ll target schools. What does he think they’ll do? Target branches of the National Secular Society?

The organisation is called the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Societies (AHS). The paper says:

The federation aims to encourage students to lobby their schools and local authorities over what is taught in RE lessons and to call for daily acts of collective worship to be scrapped. It wants the societies to hold talks and educational events to persuade students not to believe in God.

Chloë Clifford-Frith, AHS co-founder, said that the societies would act as a direct challenge to the Christian message being taught in schools.

She expressed concern that Christian Unions could influence vulnerable teenagers looking for a club to belong to with fundamentalist doctrine.

Is that phrase “to persuade students not to believe in God” in the federation’s articles or rules? Somehow I doubt it. I suspect – though may be wrong – that this wording is that of Jonathan Wynne-Jones, who is, after all, writing for a right-wing, Establishment, pro-religion newspaper.

In particular, says Clifford-Frith, some students are being told that homosexuality is a sin and that they should believe the Biblical account of creation.

“We want to point out how silly some of these beliefs are and hope that these groups will help to do that,” she said.

The Telegraph says the number of groups reported by the AHS to be active on campuses has risen from seven in the 2007/8 academic year to twenty-five in 2008/9, including societies at the universities of Oxford and Durham.

Of course, the religionists are taking it all in their stride and welcoming the chance of debate. Not! Well, not if this claim is true:

Leeds Atheist Society claims to have experienced discrimination, vandalism, theft and death threats from religious groups on campus, who oppose the open expression of an atheist viewpoint and blasphemy.

The paper quotes Simon Calvert of the Christian Institute as saying, “Atheists are becoming increasingly militant in their desperate attempts to stamp out faith. It is deeply worrying that they now want to use children to attack the Christian ethos of their schools.”

You can’t help but feel sorry for anyone who can utter this drivel and believe it. What Calvert and his ilk can’t see is the irony of the phrase “they want to use children”. What, Mr Calvert, the way religionists use children all the time, right from baptising them without their consent at the age of a few days or weeks, to indoctrinating them with fairy stories as truth right from an early age in schools?

That sort of using children?

And "use children to attack" Christianity? Is that what these societies are about: attack? Not just providing a means for like-minded pupils and students to resist the brainwashing?

I doubt very much that atheists and agnostics and freethinkers on school and college campuses are going to disrupt religious groups. If they do, then they’re bang out of order. All groups should have the right to hold gatherings and believe what they wish to believe – religious groups included.

Presumably, these societies of nonbelievers want there to be debate and an opportunity for young people to feel they’re getting support if they want to rid themselves of fantastical stories about sky fairies told as fact.

As things stand, most nontheist schoolkids are pretty much on their own. If they have a school society they can belong to, they can counter religious nonsense in their schools with whatever means are open to them – such as (in the case of some sixth-formers) opting out of religious indoctrination or (in the case of younger kids) putting pressure on their mums and dads to write letters telling the schools to excuse their offspring from religious assemblies and the like.

Having such a society on campus or within schools’ societies and clubs will, or should, make some pupils curious. Provided no one forces anyone to do anything against his or her will, all should be well.

And get this:

In a further development to strengthen the role of atheism among the younger generation, the first summer camp for irreligious children or the children of nontheistic parents is being held this summer.

Not “questioning” or “nontheist” or “freethinking”, note, but “irreligious”, which means hostile to religion or indifferent to it. But the use of that word in this context suggests that irreligion is somehow a break from some norm, rather than the default position that we find ourselves in at birth: i.e. with no religion.

So what are the Deluded Herd worried about? Do they fear that their emperor’s new clothes will be seen for what they are: a figment of the imagination? Is their “faith” not strong enough to equip them with the wherewithal to argue their corner?

Religion has been an organised force for a long time. Nonbelief is now organising itself, and, because it will have to argue from reason and not from blind faith in impossible phenomena, it will have a good chance of honing itself into a formidable opponent.