What Is a Christian?

You would think, from the stentorian, yet at the same time, strangely (dare I say) shrill complaints from some Christians, that Richard Dawkins has reserved the right to himself to say who is, and who isn’t, entitled to call themselves Christian. A less biased and hysterical interpretation of the poll that the RDFRS commissioned (but did NOT itself conduct) would put the shoe firmly on the other foot; it is not Dawkins who is telling people what they must believe to be a Christian, but the two-faced Christian leaders who, admittedly say that Christianity is a broad church on the one hand (when they want to show that they are the majority), but then insist that their way is the only right way when they want to make or influence public policy.

Many of the louder faux martyrs have focussed on just one question’s result, which showed that only 35% of the people polled who ticked the “Christian” box in the census could name the first book of the New Testament, saying that it was unfair that people should have to answer correctly in order to say they were Christian. I hope I’ve already shown that that isn’t what the poll, or Dawkins, or even that question is about: rather, it is about showing that the Christians with power or influence, or just loud voices, cannot assume that all Christians agree with their political/theological opinions.

That wasn’t the only way that the “Matthew question” was dishonestly represented though. Self-identified Christians were asked to name the first book of the NT not out of the blue, but from a list of four options, two of which were Old Testament books. Giles Fraser challenged Dawkins, on the spot, to give the full title of Darwin’s book, “Origin of Species”, whereas it would have been fairer to ask Dawkins to simply identify it from a list of book titles. Not that Dawkins would need a multiple choice question but, in any case, one question alone isn’t very significant.

But then, nobody without a vested interest in religion pretends that it is.

A Study in Desperation – A Concocted Dawkins Scandal

I didn’t really expect the Telegraph to go through with it, the “scandalous revelation” that one of Richard Dawkins’ ancestors owned slaves, but they have, and the article is even more scurrilous than I expected.

It starts badly: “Richard Dawkins, the secularist campaigner against “intolerance and suffering”, must face an awkward revelation: he is descended from slave owners and his family estate was bought with a fortune partly created by forced labour.”

Why must Dawkins be singled out, because he knows the name of his slaver ancestor? We all have unsavoury characters in our family tree, and some more admirable ones too, but we don’t all know their names. Besides, we aren’t responsible for what happened long before we were born, good or bad, so we should take neither the blame nor the credit.

The article continues, at some length, to mudsling-by-proxy, citing other examples of Dawkins’ ancestry who the “journalist”, Adam Lusher, obviously considers should be regarded as shameful, and them arrives at this conclusion:

“He is now facing calls to apologise and make reparations for his family’s past.

Esther Stanford-Xosei, of Lewisham, south London, the co-vice chairman of the Pan-African Reparations Coalition in Europe, said: “There is no statute of limitations on crimes against humanity.

“The words of the apology need to be backed by action. The most appropriate course would be for the family to fund an educational initiative telling the history of slavery and how it impacts on communities today, in terms of racism and fractured relationships.”"

It’s true, there is no statute of limitation on crimes against humanity, except one. Death. The people in Dawkins’ family who owned slaves are all long dead, and the money they made is all spent. The same almost certainly applies to my family, and yours too, especially if you are of white European extraction.

There is one last parting shot:

“On Tuesday 14 February, some critics branded him “an embarrassment to atheism” after what many listeners considered a humiliation in a Radio 4 debate with Giles Fraser, formerly Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral, in which the professor boasted he could recite the full title of Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of Species”, then when challenged, dithered and said: “Oh God.”"

As I’ve already addressed this point, I’ll just note that the image that popped into my mind when I read this was of a petulant child, lower lip quivering, shouting “…and another thing”, before being sent to bed with no supper.

And so Adam Lusher should be.

 

And, of course, the Mail has chimed in. Read more here: http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/02/19/and-now-the-daily-mail/

In Defence of Dawkins

Richard Dawkins isn’t always right about everything. I’ve criticised his handling of the RDF forum meltdown and, in this very blog, I wasn’t too kind about his comments about “elevatorgate“.

But some of the abuse he has received lately would be comical, if it weren’t so nasty.

There was a mildly embarrassing moment in an interview for the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, when Dawkins “blanked” while trying to remember the full title of Darwin’s “Origin of Species.  Somehow, this was deemed comparable to many Christians not being able to say what the first book of the New Testament is, despite it being a multiple choice question, with two of the other choices being Old Testament books!

How the poor, martyred Christians crowed! How they shouted that this proved that Britain is a Christian country, especially when Dawkins muttered “Oh god”! (It should be noted that Dawkins has frequently said that he is a cultural Christian, so unconscious mutterings like that shouldn’t be surprising, nor are they significant.)

Far nastier is the attempt to smear Dawkins name, not because of his own words or actions, but because of the actions of his ancestors.

For example:

“We’ve been researching the history of the Dawkins family, and have discovered that your ancestors owned slaves in Jamaica in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. What have you got to say about that?”

 “Darwinian natural selection has a lot to do with genes, do you agree? Well, some people might suggest that you could have inherited a gene for supporting slavery from Henry Dawkins.”

The Telegraph, though politically biased, is still regarded by many as a respectable newspaper, yet its reporter behaved like a particularly slimy tabloid hack.  Will the story be printed? Has the Telegraph really sunk so low?

We’ll have to see tomorrow.

Strange Bedfellows

Pope Benedict XVI and Baroness Warsi, seemingly the self-appointed Minister for Promoting Religion, have two things in common, despite being followers of different faiths. Neither of them understands what secularism is, and they are both terrified of it.
A secular state is one in which a person’s religious views are nobody else’s business, least of all the government’s, and where people of different religions, or of none, can coexist without interference (provided that the practice of a religion doesn’t curtail the rights of others, such as killing people for not worshipping the same deity in the same way).
Warsi, a muslim, should be grateful that she can practice her religion in Britain. In some Islamic countries non-muslims would be persecuted. Not the imagined persecution that exists only in the minds of some religious people in Britain, but real persecution, sometimes involving real torture and death.
The Pope too should reflect that the open practice of his particular denomination was once a criminal offence and, but for secularism, he would not have been allowed into the country, let alone feted by dignitaries.
Yet so desperate are they that their delusions are going out of fashion, they attack the very thing that allows them freedom of conscience.

And religion does seem to be going out of fashion, particularly the louder and more intrusive forms of it. A poll commissioned by the Richard Dawkins Foundation For Reason and Science, conducted by Ipsos MORI, suggests that religion is not as pervasive as recent census results might have us believe.

The poll was commissioned in anticipation of the 2011 census result, in which, as usual, there was a question about religion. It has long been suspected that the answer to that question was skewed by people who put “C of E” (or whatever religion applied to their family) just because that was what they always put, and they didn’t know the could do otherwise.

The poll would seem to confirm this, and to confirm what I’ve been saying for a while: the religious nutters making all the noise bear no relation to the real people I meet every day.

For more information about the RDFRS’s poll, click on the links below.

Mori poll press release 1

Mori poll press release 2

Happy Darwin Day

Charles Darwin was born on February 12th 1809, and 50 years later published what was arguably the most important book of science in history.

wanted to make a picture to celebrate, but all the best ideas had already been done, so instead here’s a link to Darwin’s works. I personally prefer paper books, but an online resource is sometimes useful when arguing with creationists, who often lie about what Darwin actually wrote.

Stupid Fakers

I’ve seen quite a few stories from the USA, a country with religious freedom enshrined in its constitution, featuring people, often children, dying from treatable illnesses because they or their families put their faith, literally, in the power of prayer. It seems this corrupt practice is spreading to the UK, at least partly financed by American evangelists.
And it is corrupt. I can understand desperate people grasping for anything that might help them, however implausible. It isn’t those people who anger me.
It’s the ones who prey (no pun intended) on the vulnerable, sometimes for financial gain (have you ever seen a poor televangelist?), or for status within their religious group.
I know a lot of Christians, and while they believe in the efficacy of prayer, nobody I know would consider it sufficient by itself.
The people behind Believe TV (fined £25k by Ofcom) and HOTS in Bath, whose advertisement was banned by the ASA, do seem to think prayer is sufficient, or at least they claim it is. If desperate, vulnerable people believe them, they may well forgo the conventional medicine that could save their lives.

No doubt when people die, they will be deemed not to have prayed hard enough.

 

More about the ASA’s adjudication of HOTS here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-16871116

I’m an Electronic Cigarette “Smoker” – 1st Anniversary

It is now a year (give or take a couple of days or so) since I switched from tobacco cigarettes to electronic ones. Apart from one occasion, when I left the house with the wrong (uncharged) batteries, I haven’t smoked at all (and on that one occasion I hated the taste).
I’ve changed the kind of ecig I use, from cartridges to the tank system. This involves refilling a small plastic tank, the size of a cartridge, with nicotine liquid, but there is no wadding, so each refill lasts longer than a cartridge. You can also see how much liquid is left, as the tank is clear.
The biggest change, however, is the way I “smoke”. When I first switched, I was using the ecig as if it was a real one; that is, I was trying to finish the cigarette, and had to make a conscious effort to stop before using up the equivalent of 20 cigarettes in one go!
Now, though, I can happily go without for longer, knowing that I don’t have to take every opportunity of being outside to smoke, whether or not I’m running low on my nicotine fix. Providing I use a little discretion, I can use the ecig pretty much anywhere.
As I get older, and this carcase of mine gradually falls apart, at least I can breathe more easily than I used to.

Carry On Lying

Rod Liddle, in a radio interview, continued to spread lies about M.E. and fibromyalgia, while shouting down opposing views. Another interviewee made a minor mistake, saying that diabetes wasn’t recognised 50 years ago, and Liddle pounced on it as if it proved his point, then when the interviewee tried to correct herself, he wouldn’t shut up and allow her to do so.

Liddle had made the spurious point that  M.E. and fibromyalgia were unknown 20 or 30 years ago (untrue, as there were reports of M.E. in 1934, and it was recognised by the World Health Organisation in 1969), to which the response should have been that there was a time when diabetes wasn’t known about. It was a minor error, but one which someone as dishonest as Liddle could make a sufficient fuss about that he could cover his own inadequate arguments.

A Liddle Bit of Perspective – The Clarkson Defence

The reaction to Rod Liddle’s venomous attack on the disabled has been largely anger, but I have noticed some comments along the lines of “Well, he’s just like Jeremy Clarkson, don’t take any notice, he’s harmless.”

The trouble is some people will take him seriously. Despite the fact that the publication his remarks were published in is laughable to most intelligent people, it is not deliberately funny.

Even with intended satire, there are those who take it seriously. Warren Mitchell was plagued for years by morons who applauded his character in “Till Death Us Do Part“, Alf Garnett for the bigotry he displayed.

So when somebody who purports to be a serious writer spouts the nonsense that Liddle did, even more people will believe him, and they don’t have to be bigots themselves.

This will, of course, delight the current government, who seem hell bent on dismantling the welfare system.

Modern first-world governments govern by the consent of the governed, but it should be informed consent, not the lies that the ConDems, and lackeys such as Liddle, are peddling.

Pretend Journalist Writes Garbage

Rod Liddle, already known to many of us as a misogynist, racist, religious bigot and liar, has now targeted disabled people. In today’s Sun “newspaper” (and yes, the scare quotes are in the right place) he has denounced most disabled,especially those who claim disability benefits, as “pretend disabled”.

Here are a few quotes from his diatribe, as collated by the Political Scrapbook blog.

“My New Year’s resolution for 2012 was to become disabled. Nothing too serious, maybe just a bit of a bad back or one of those newly invented illnesses which make you a bit peaky for decades – fibromyalgia, or M.E.”

“And being disabled is incredibly fashionable. The number of people who claim to be disabled has doubled in the past ten years.”

“I think we should all pretend to be disabled for a month or so, claim benefits and hope this persuades the authorities to sort out the mess.”

“It has become easier to claim those benefits, partly as a consequence of the disablement charities who, out of their own self-interest, insist that an ever-greater proportion of the population is disabled.”

Even if Liddle were to pass the exams necessary to make an accurate diagnosis, he could not possibly examine enough people to make such a gross generalisation remotely worthwhile.
Of course, Liddle isn’t the only one picking on the disabled. The ConDem government, while pushing their Welfare “reforms”, continue to brief against the most vulnerable in society. Liddle just can’t resist such an easy target for his vitriol.

Update: If you are on Facebook, there’s a page called Justice for people with Fibromyalgia/M.E against Rob Liddle (columinist), where you can add your voice to the growing number of people angered by this clown.

There’s also a petition that people in the UK can sign, about recognising the illnesses that Liddle writes off as “pretend”: http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/20035