freeinfidel

The bizarre pseudo-religion Scientology faces being banned in France if its leaders - currently on trial - are found guilty of seizing victims’ fortunes by “exerting a psychological hold”.

Given that this is a perfect description of what Scientology is all about, it doesn’t look good for the wacky cult.

The ‘church’ itself is on trial alongside the six leaders (there was a seventh who died).

There are two cases going through the courts. In one, the plaintiff alleges that the cult preyed on her when she was in a fragile psychological condition, relieving her of a large sum of money for worthless products.

In the other case, a woman claims her boss fired her after she refused to participate in Church of Scientology courses.

Both cases demonstrate how the cult operates through a process of indoctrination and brainwashing. Two other complainants dropped out: no reasons were given, but the Church of Scientology is notorious for its harassment and intimidation of those who stand against it.

This isn’t the first time the wealthy and powerful organisation has been in trouble in France. But this time it might face a complete ban - another good reason to live in France.

Not long after the laws of England & Wales were finally cleansed of the archaic offense of blasphemy, there are forces in Ireland that want to actually introduce such a law there.

While most of us have made it into the 21st Century, there are people who would prefer to drag us back into the Middle Ages.

Dermot Ahern, Minister for Justice, is one of the main agitators for a clause in the Defamation Bill, currently before the Irish Parliament, that would make blasphemy illegal.

With fines of up to €100,000, the law would punish “A person who publishes or utters blasphemous matter” which is defined as “grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion; and he or she intends, by the publication of the matter concerned, to cause such outrage”.

One might assume that the clause is intended primarily to protect the Roman Catholic faith, and that the “any religion” definition is there to make it appear more reasonable.

But let’s say I invent a new religion (and why not? All religions are invented) - perhaps a faith that sanctifies the abuse of little children (no, wait, the Catholics have done that one), or maybe a religion that claims the moon is made of cheese and that the Queen is a shape-shifting alien. Presumably I could use that law in Ireland to prevent anyone taking the piss. After all, as the only follower of the faith, I would easily represent “a substantial number of the adherents”.

I present this reductio ad absurdum scenario to make a point. Even a casual examination of most faiths reveals them to be full of bizarre, outlandish, indefensible and often dangerous claims. Religions are used all too frequently to repress and oppress, to close minds and hold back progress. Far from being protected, they must be open to criticism.

I find many of religion’s ideas and precepts outrageous and offensive: there are, for example, people who genuinely believe they regularly eat the flesh and drink the blood of a man who’s been dead for 2,000 years, and that those of us who fail to engage in this necrophiliac cannibalism must suffer eternal torture. Any law that restricts my ability to say that such beliefs are idiotic piffle is an unwarranted attack on free speech.

Ireland has made great strides in the past few years in loosening the manacles of the Catholic church. It would be a shame to see the country slide back into superstitious intolerance.

A Brazilian archbishop has provoked a storm of protest through an act of excommunication. He expelled a woman from the faith - and condemned her to eternal torture - for failing to prevent her nine year-old daughter from having an abortion.

This heartless behaviour by Archbishop José Cardoso Sobrinho has itself been roundly condemned by politicians and even some theologians.

The girl was repeatedly raped by her stepfather over a period of at least three years. The stepfather has not been excommunicated. That retribution was saved for those who displayed compassion and understanding towards the girl - her mother and the doctor who performed the procedure.

What is surprising, though, is that people are surprised.

Sobrinho acted correctly - at least within the strictly limited boundaries of his world.

A religion is defined (and differentiated from others) by its belief system - its rules, its doctrine. The particulars of any one religion lie at the root of its claim to be the only true religion. They are what falsify all other faiths.

These rules and boundaries exist because they are the means by which the specific faith declares “this is who we are and what we stand for”. They are claimed as truths before which we must all yield. They are also the framework for the faith’s claim to morality.

This raises a problem. Although religious believers often lay claim to a moral superiority, the fact is that this doctrine represents a straitjacket. It denies the believer many avenues of moral, ethical, empathetic and humanitarian action.

Adherents must act according to these rules, otherwise they are not true believers. In that context, Sobrinho not doubt understood that excommunication, however immoral and uncaring it may seem to the rest of us, was unequivocally demanded. The basic tenets of the faith trump all humanity.

Now, it’s entirely possible that some bigwig in the Roman Catholic church - the Pope himself, perhaps - might override this decision. It’s happened before when such an act of faith has resulted in a PR nightmare for the church. What what would that mean for the religion?

If matters of doctrine become flexible, they also become meaningless. These matters are not defined and guided by reason. They are deemed to be eternal ‘truths’. As soon as they are seen to be alterable, in the interests of good publicity or other less spiritual motives, then they reveal the entire faith as hollow.

This might go some way to explain the diminishing of religions like Roman Catholocism. Either they remain rigid, true to their core beliefs - and thus reveal themselves as uncaring, inhuman and irrelevant to modern life. Or they adapt, and thus admit that the ‘eternal truths’ at the heart of the faith are nothing of the sort.

It’s a stark choice - to be irrelevant or meaningless.

The BBC series ‘Around the World in 80 Faiths’ has come to an end, and it seems like it was not a moment too soon.

Not that it was a bad series. Far from it. As a whirlwind tour of all varieties of mankind’s credulity, it was highly entertaining. The problem was that it was (perhaps necessarily, given the number of faiths) disappointingly superficial.

The presenter, Anglican vicar Peter Owen Jones, seemed to do his best to engage with each faith, though it was easy to see how he was predisposed to like some more than others. However, it was hard to shake the impression that this was little more than religious tourism of the most shallow kind.

Even when Owen Jones seemed to attempt to pursue a more profound question, it was usually done and dusted within a couple of minutes of airtime. Take, for example, his acknowledgement in the last programme of Martin Luther’s vile anti-semitism - a model that the Nazis referenced and on which they built. Owen Jones made a show of being guilt-ridden by this dark and shameful part of his own faith, because he was, that evening, to share a meal with Jews. When he brought up the subject over dinner, his Jewish host gave a generous response - that acknowledging the problem was the first step to solving it. This was, perhaps, more indicative of traditional Jewish hospitality than a highly developed philosophy. Owen Jones’ response was to treat the camera to one of his trademark gormless smiles and a statement to the effect that ‘that’s alright then’.

This was typical both of the programme’s superficiality and Owen Jones’ tendency to be easy on both himself and spirituality in general. He never really asked tough questions or delved with any seriousness into the causes or motivations of the faiths he briefly visited.

As the series progressed, he seemed in more and more of a rush. Perhaps his year-long odyssey was exhausting him, but by the last episode he seemed to be doing little more than name-checking faiths, with little attempt to explain their significance. His coverage of the Sami people in Finland, for example, amounted to little more than sitting in a tent with a shaman, grunting a little and banging a drum. He seemed unaware that joiks, the Sami’s unique musical form, is far more complex and rich than the simple chanting in which he momentarily indulged himself. Ray Mears covered this fascinating culture in far greater depth and with much more empathy, and did so as just part of a single programme.

The last programme was also marred by a naked display of prejudice. Predictably, the target of this bias was atheism.

In a series about faith, presented by a priest, I wasn’t expecting to see much coverage of atheism - let alone to see it presented as one of the 80 ‘faiths’. The only mention I’d seen so far (I missed one episode) was a rather sneering reference in the first programme which made the mistake of assuming that atheism is inherently reductionist and hostile to a sense of wonder. It is, of course, quite the reverse: but shedding the blinkers and restriction of religious dogma, it gies one the freedom to enjoy the full splendour, complexity and mystery of the universe.

Atheism, of course, is not a faith in that in does not require the suspension of rationality to believe in something for which there is no evidence. So counting it as one of the 80 faiths was, at best, a misrepresentation - one is tempted to use the word ‘lie’, and I’m not sure that I shouldn’t. Worse, Owen Jones decided to represent atheism by conflating it with communism, or more specifically, Stalinism.

This is a cheap trick, not uncommon among believers. Yes, Stalin both espoused and enforced atheism. But that does not make his actions or beliefs atheist. They were Stalinist. Stalinism was a totalitarian regime that, to aid its own survival, had to stand in conflict with other totalitarian regimes - notably, religion. Stalin’s repression of religion was ideological - and that ideology was communism, not atheism.

To use the excesses or characteristics of Stalinism to describe atheism - to equate the two - is not just logically and intellectually absurd, it is deeply dishonest. One might just as easily characterise and represent Christianity by the burning of witches.

Atheism is a philosphical (not religious) viewpoint - it is not a ideology. (And it should be noted that the richness of humanism, its history and philosophy, received only the curtest of passing mentions.) The tawdry trick employed by Owen Jones was the most obvious example of his prejudices coming to the fore. Of course, he wasn’t always called to the cloth: he is, in that respect, a convert. And it is typical of converts to turn their hate on what they may perceive as their own former inadequacies and on what they fear most.

Owen Jones also raved about the resurgence of spirituality in Russia (though not necessarily the old established faiths) without ever really questioning why this should be so. As presented, the implication was simply that, once the enforcement of atheism was lifted, people naturally return to religion. His interview with the token atheist went a very small way to suggesting an alternative - but not far enough.

Religion feeds on fear and uncertainty, and there has been plenty of both in post-communist Russia. People crave the stability of ceremony and community, and churches are happy to provide both. Hence people turn to the church - whatever church - not because the religion is offering something that is right or profound, but simply for the protection and comfort it provides. In this environment, an invisible pink unicorn or Flying Spaghetti Monster will function as well as Christ or Mohammed.

It would have been interesting if Owen Jones had thought to question the political and sociological forces at work. But his brief was very narrow and, being a believer, he is deeply biased towards believing that the embrace of supernatural ideas and submission to religious dogma are natural and right and trump everything else. This unwillingness to look further is a characteristic of the fundamental problem religion has with truth.

This series would have been so much more interesting, so much more valuable and profound, if Owen Jones had made his voyage alongside a humanist, or scientist, or psychologist. Then we could perhaps have had some answers to the key question, ‘why?’. But I don’t think Owen Jones would have had either the courage or honesty to do this.

A Guardian article about how marriage rates are plummeting contained one minor but, for me, highly significant detail. Even among those people who do say ‘I do’, an ever-reducing proportion of them are doing so in church.

According to the article:

…perhaps understandably, given the number of empty pews across the nation’s churches each Sunday, far fewer weddings include a religious ceremony nowadays. The number of couples saying their vows before God has halved since 1991.

Now, an apologist for religion might claim this as evidence of increasing godlessness. They will say that it’s evidence of moral decline. That is, of course, nonsense.

What it shows is that many of those people who did get married in church, both prior to and after 1991, did so for reasons that have nothing to do with religion or faith. Many of them, in fact, were almost certainly functional atheists.

I’ve known many people with no real faith - people who can’t be bothered to think about god from one year to the next and, if pushed, would confess that they are at most vaguely deistic or agnostic - who insisted on getting married in church.

Why? Because it’s traditional. Churches provide a picturesque and appropriately serious setting for the couple’s most important day. A wedding is an event and requires a suitable stage. Many people get married in a specific church because it’s part of the local community’s infrastructure, or because their parents got married there. I’ve known non-believing people to get their children baptised for similar reasons.

So why are people now turning away from the church? Well, the date of 1991 is significant. A new law was introduced around that time that allowed weddings to take place in approved locations other than registry offices and churches. Hotels, castles, stately homes - all manner of beautiful and impressive locations applied for and received licences that allowed marriage ceremonies to be carried out there. The only main provisos were that the location had to be a permanent structure (so still no weddings in hot air balloons) and must be accessible to the public.

Suddenly, couples discovered that they could have all the benefits of a church wedding (beautiful surroundings, etc) without any of that religious nonsense.

I’m sure that, even among those people still getting married in church, there are many who are not really believers but are doing so for the reasons already explained. Many churches, after all, still provide an attractive atmosphere. And there are plenty of people who are, at heart, deeply traditional, without being genuinely religious.

I’ve said before, and will say again, that the apparent religiosity of a society is, in many important ways, an illusion. People will continue to hang on to the rites and ceremonies of religion long after true belief has vanished. This is a cultural phenomenon, not a spiritual one.

A blanket lifting of excommunications by the Pope has had the effect of bringing back into the Roman Catholic church a bishop who also happens to be a notorious Holocaust denier.

Richard Williamson, from Britain, was one of four bishops appointed more than 20 years ago by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who was himself ousted from the Roman Catholic church for his refusal to accept ‘liberal’ reforms such as the abandoning of the Latin Mass.

Now Williamson is back in the club, in spite of the fact that he is a forthright Nazi apologist. According to the BBC:

Bishop Richard Williamson recently told Swedish TV: “I believe there were no gas chambers. I think that two to three hundred thousand Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps but none of them by gas chambers.”

The Vatican has said that the four bishops - who also include two Frenchmen and one Argentinian - have agreed to accept current Catholic teachings and papal authority. And that’s enough to save them from everlasting torment. Aligning themselves with some of the greatest mass murderers in history isn’t a problem, it seems.

Clearly the Roman Catholic church will take anyone these days. Maybe it’s a reaction to their dwindling numbers.

One has to wonder about the morality and ethics of a sect where a willingness to accept dogma and the word of the boss is deemed far more important than, say, the truth. Or simple decency. Or, for that matter, morals.

The Roman Catholic church was always far too cozy with the Nazis. During the war, the Pope liked to send Hitler birthday greetings and there is plenty of evidence of colusion. After the war, the Vatican was implicated in helping leading Nazis to escape. But one would have hoped that they’d have got over their infatuation with (other) vicious totalitarian regimes. Not entirely, it seems.

I’m watching the BBC series ‘Around the World in 80 Faiths‘ with great fascination and enjoyment. Anglican vicar Peter Owen Jones is an engaging, entertaining and (up to a point) honest guide to the world’s rich variety of spiritual wackiness.

Peter Owen Jones

Owen Jones ‘heard the call’ 15 years ago, having previously spent his time running discos and advertising campaigns. According to the BBC’s website, this rustic padre feels that the Church of England “is too much a faith of the head and not enough a faith of the soul”. This televised journey, then, is a search for the pure spirit of the divine and how it manifests itself in so many ways.

As our guide, Owen Jones is remarkably willing to immerse himself in beliefs and practices very alien to the genteel rituals of an Anglican service. Sometimes he is moved, sometimes bemused and (so far - I’m three episodes in at this point) only once really disgusted. A voodoo ceremony at which animals - including a kitten and a puppy - were bloodily sacrificed left him very disturbed. His revulsion, it seems, was not on theological grounds but simple humanitarian ones and was easily shared by atheists like me. Believe all the hocus pocus you like, but leave the kitten out of it.

Naturally he has his limits. As a believer, Owen Jones is rather too willing to see people - and feel himself - moved by the holy spirit where a more neutral observer might witness hysteria, hyperventilation or simple credulity.

On the whole, though, Owen Jones is accommodating and open. Indeed, the only note of disdain so far was reserved for atheists. He said something to the effect that we infidels would regard all these manifestations of the divine as a “form of disease”. I’m not sure if Owen Jones is aware of the variety of attitudes towards religion among atheists, or whether his generosity of spirit simply stops short of those who don’t share his belief in the divine. Either way, it’s worth noting that not all of us consider religious belief per se to be a disease or shared dementia. In fact, I believe that a predisposition to spiritual experience is a natural result of evolution - a subject to which I will return in a future blog.

I’m looking forward to the rest of the series, keen to know if Owen Jones will address the one big question that so far he has avoided. There seems to be a implication, from what he has said, that the prevalence of religion across the world means that there is a common phenomenon behind it - no less than the divine itself. This is an argument that crops up often: if so many people believe in a divine spirit, it must be there.

This, of course, is poor logic. There is an obvious counter argument which hinges on the fact that the very nature of religious belief is exclusiveness. Religions are not mutually compatible. You cannot accept more than one. You must, by that token, believe that all the others are wrong. And yet there are thousands of separate religions and, within each faith, many variations of the type. The divisions between them are so hotly debated that the supremacy of one over another is often expressed violently, at the cost of many lives and much suffering.

And it’s self-evidently true that they can’t all be right. At most, there could be only one true faith. Therefore, even if you are a believer, you must believe that the vast majority of faiths are … well … nonsense. No matter how fervent your faith in your god and your prophets and your mythical tales, you have to contend with the simple fact that the majority of people in the world - even the religious ones - think that what you believe is rubbish.

How would we recognise the true faith? For me, a key test would be reliability. If a faith is real, it should work - not now and again, not in strange and oblique ways, but reliably and repeatedly. And yet we know that no faith matches this criterion. Prayers and imprecations are, at best, a hit and miss affair. Even the most extreme piety, the most self-abasing unctuousness, only rarely seems to deliver results. And if a faith really was the genuine article, then surely it would seem self-evident. Everyone would flock to it. All others would fall away.

The faithful, of course, get around these problems with a blinding array of excuses and prevarications. Chief among these is the idea that we are being tested. Yes, even supposedly loving gods, who are keen to bring us to their ethereal bosoms, enjoy tormenting us - to an extent, in fact, which means that most of us will fail.

Now try applying common sense to this situation. If even the faithful insist that the vast majority of religions are wrong - indeed, all but one of them - then it stands to reason that there is a very good chance that all of them are. As we’ve already seen, if you pick any one faith you’ll find most of the people in the world are against it. You can do this for every religion.

So, if all the religions are demonstrably wrong, and they all have the divine as their common thread, the inescapable conclusion is that the very concept of the divine is itself wrong. It might be a delusion. It might be the ‘misfiring’ (as Dawkins would put it) of part of our psyche (which is kind of where I’m heading with the evolution thing). It might simply be that we poor mammals are simply not up to the task of comprehending the entire universe and must weave stories to accommodate what we can’t fully grasp.

Whatever the explanation for our tendency towards superstition, if we are honest we must at least acknowledge the possibility that at the heart of the world’s religions lies … nothing. That the divine is merely a common and rather simple device employed by the other thing we all share - our brains. So far, this is what Owen Jones has failed to do. Oh well, just sit back and enjoy the wackiness.

A furore in Germany over an Islamic scholar’s claim that Mohammed might not have existed highlights a fundamental difficulty in many religions - that they emphasise faith and dismiss calls for proof while simultaneously basing their beliefs around alleged facts.

The two most problematic faiths in this regard are Christianity and Islam. Both, of course, claim Christ as a once-living prophet. A critical tennet of Christianity - at least for the vast majority of Christians - is that Jesus was the embodiment of god on this earth. Similarly, for Muslims, it is vitally important that Mohammed was a real person who took dictation from the Archangel Gabriel.

There is a fairly long tradition in Christianity of examining the historicity of Christ. We all know that there is no documentary evidence for his existence. Even the biblical ‘evidence’ is contradictory. The Gospels offer conflicting portraits, depending on the agenda behind their creation and subsequent amendments. And the Epistles portray a figure who is far more consistent with a mythological character, ‘existing’ in the lowest realm of heaven (where, according to the theology of the day, demons lived) than a human who walked the same earth as ourselves. In short, no amount of historical research is able to settle the question of whether Christ ever lived, while rational analysis of the texts and the lack of supporting evidence would suggest that he didn’t.

Muhammad Sven Kalisch, chair of Islamic Studies at the University of Münster, has applied similar historical analysis to Mohammed. And he’s come up with a similar result.

“My position with regard to the historical existence of Muhammad is that I believe neither his existence nor his non-existence can be proven,” he said. “I, however, lean toward the non-existence.”

The problem this creates is that it would seem to invalidate the Qur’an. According to Islamic tradition, the Qur’an was the result of Mohammed being visited by the Archangel Gabriel on many occasions, starting in 610CE and lasting until 632CE. Mohammed himself did not write down what was said to him: he was illiterate. At first, Islam was largely an oral tradition, though certain of Mohammed’s followers each wrote down parts of what they heard. It was only two years after the Prophet’s death, when the new faith had already started to factionalise and war had killed many of those who had learned the Qur’an by rote, that the first caliph, Abu Bakr, ordered the whole text to be written in a definitive version. A single copy was created. Twelve years later, the third caliph, ‘Uthman, ordered additional copies to be made. This ‘Uthmanic Codex is regarded by most Muslims as the canonic text. The Qur’an, then, has some advantages over the Christian Bible in terms of textual integrity.

Of course, what the Qur’an actually says is open to wider interpretation. And if Mohammed did not exist, where did the text actually come from? Muslims believe that the Qur’an is the infallible and unalterable word of god. It is important to them that these words were dictated directly from god’s representative and that they have been captured accurately.

Kalisch takes a less literal and more spiritual approach.

“All the various sacred books are the product of human minds and experiences,” he said. God exists and works on a more spiritual level, he insists. Sacred texts should be approached as expressions of our relationship to (and, perhaps, desires for) a deity. They are also products of their time and place (which is why, for example, the flood story in the Old Testament mentions no animal that wouldn’t have been known to inhabitants of the Middle East).

That’s not going to please many Muslims. One of the great attractions of religion is that it offers certainties in an uncertain world. If the canonical texts of your chosen religion turn out to be nothing more than the works of humans striving to find answers and shape their relationships with god, then much certainty is removed. All becomes open to interpretation. The easy answers to difficult questions are taken away.

Once believers acknowledge that there are no facts at the heart of their faith, they must also face the uncomfortable consequence that they can no longer claim superiority. If the New Testament is simply a mythical tale, if the Qur’an is based on ideas spun around a mythical story, that breaks the direct link with god and belief becomes nothing more than a fanciful notion or wishful thinking. And so, believers find themselves insisting on at least one physical truth at the heart of their belief - that Christ and/or Mohammed walked the Earth. It is a shame for them that they are unable to verify even this one basic fact.

Alleged actor Tom Cruise, while busily promoting his latest movie, is claiming that he has been forced into hiding following death threats from opponents of Scientology. According to ’sources’, Cruise has called in the FBI to provide him and his family with protection.

The Mail on Sunday reported that Cruise and his wife, Katie Holmes (also a Scientology cult member) now live separately and go everywhere in bomb-proof vehicles.

Quite what the FBI can do for them is a moot point. The grotesquely overpaid Cruise can afford much better protection than the cash-strapped Bureau could provide.

Of course, Cruise is in need of some publicity for his movie, Valkyrie, which has come in for some considerable criticism. And paranoia is not unknown among fabulously wealthy actors. As Hemingway put it, “Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.” As YouTube videos and appearances on Oprah have confirmed, Cruise isn’t always in full control of his emotions.

The people who allegedly have Cruise wetting his pants are the members of Anonymous - the net-based loose association of anti-Scientologists notorious for extreme acts of … well, wearing masks. Maybe a bit of hacking. But, of course, if you want to crush opposition in these paranoid times, one effective method is to brand your opponents as terrorists. This is, undoubtedly, what the Scientologists are up to.

The Church of Scientology is not known for its honesty, ethics or morality when it comes to those who oppose it. As the Religion News Blog points out, if the stories of ex-members are to be believed, the cult itself isn’t above savage, vindictive and illegal acts.

So, it would probably be safe to treat Cruise’s claims as: a) publicity; b) paranoia; c) an attempt to silence the opposition with lies; d) pure fantasy; or e) all of the above. Unless, of course, Cruise can produce any evidence. But then, evidence doesn’t play a strong part in the lives of religious cult members.

There’s an excellent article - My Christmas message? There’s probably no God - by the reliably feisty Polly Toynbee over at the Guardian website. Aside from being a leading journalist, Ms Toynbee is the president of the inestimable British Humanist Association (BHA - of which I am a proud member).

The piece is largely about the disestablishment of the church in the UK - a fine ambition but one not likely to be realised any time soon. For those who live in more enlightened countries with regard to religion, one might need to explain that the ‘establishment’ of the Church of England refers to the fact that it is the official state faith. And this has greater implications than the choice of carols sung at the House of Commons Xmas party.

For example, although there has been some slight reform of Parliament’s upper house, the Lords, there are still 26 unelected bishops who sit - and vote - in the house purely by dint of their cassocks. And the very existence of an established church provides ammunition for those who would perpetuate the myth of Britain being a ‘Christian’ country.

And yet, though I (and, as it happens, many church leaders) would like to see disestablishment, the fact that the UK has a state religion bothers me less than the more surreptitious ways in which religion is creeping into government business.

Given that ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair was so cosy with soon to be ex-President George W Bush, one might not be surprised to find that - following the American model - faith-based organisations are playing an ever greater role in government programmes in the UK.

Such faith-based initiatives have been a disaster for the US. For instance, there are countless examples of evangelists with no training or experience running such things as drug counselling programmes. Usually, the hapless victims who attend them do so under duress - usually at the order of a court. And the so-called ‘counselling’ often consists of no more than religious indoctrination.

In the UK, both Blair and his successor, the equally god-bothering Gordon Brown, have seen to it that organisations with religious agenda have been given preferential treatment in winning contracts to carry on what should be government work. There are more details at the BHA site, which explains:

Faith communities already have privileged access to Government. But the Government also wants to involve them in policy making, and to expand their role in the provision of services in the community. And why doesn’t Human Rights Law apply when public services are contracted out to charities?

Depressingly, President-Elect Barack Obama has stated that he wants to increase the use of faith-based initiatives. And there is no sign that this trend is abating in the UK.

The BHA is highly active in campaigning against this. It has the respect of politicians and the more progressive and intelligent members of the clergy. And I would recommend that anyone who lives in or cares about the UK should become a member.

What the UK needs isn’t just disestablishment but a genuine separation of church and state - along the lines of that in France, rather than the somewhat poor impementation of the principle in the US. The state should and must represent all citizens. Faiths are, by their very nature, exclusionary and discriminatory and they have no place in government business.