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In Japan, interest in Buddhism is waning so fast that not even bar-crawling monks can spark a revival. As with many other religions, people like the ceremony, but aren’t so fussed about the supernatural nonsense that goes with it.
Who’d have thought Bill Maher would have had such a negative view of the Republican party’s religious nutjobs. Certainly opened my eyes.
The UK’s blasphemy laws are an embarrassing anachronism. It’s time to get rid of them and an amendment to a bill going through Parliament might just achieve that.
If you’re a British voter, go to this site maintained by the British Humanist Association to find out how to contact your MP and make your views known. Time is short, so act now!
Humanity, law and democracy are poor protection against religiously inspired murder. But they are the only means available to us that offer some measure of safety while allowing us to call ourselves civilised.
London’s Metropolitan Police may soon be operating from large, fortress-style bases to which the public will have no access.
While community support officers may be based in local shop-type premises, where the rest of us will be allowed to enter, the bulk for the Met’s forces will be housed in centralised ‘warehouses’, firmly closed to the public but possibly including jail cells.
This is a dangerous move. Police forces, and the Met in particular, are vulnerable to a kind of elitist, isolationist mindset that can become a sort of siege mentality at times.
Within the force, those officers engaged in community work are often seen as ’soft’, or not doing ‘real’ policing. The Met is riddled with an atavistic, macho self-image that sees real policing involving hard men doing tough things. And this leads to the other form of isolationism - the habit of police officers to see the world divided into ‘us’ and ‘them’.
Presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee might just be the perfect candidate. With a preference for myth over truth and a willingness to publicly parade his ignorance, he’ll fit right in at the White House.
Standing before a crowd in the small town of Newton, Iowa, Huckabee summed up his election hopes with a familiar quip. “It’s scientifically impossible for the bumblebee to fly,” he said. “But the bumblebee, being unaware of these scientific facts, flies anyway.”
It was the perfect statement for Huckabee, an evangelical christian who is not shy about his dismissal of evolution and his desire to see creationism (in the dishonest disguise of ‘intelligent design’) taught in schools.
It was perfect because it so ably demonstrates Huckabee’s own qualities. For a start, it’s a lie.
The possibility that the publisher of Richard Dawkin’s ‘The God Delusion’ may be prosecuted in Turkey shows just how religious belief prevents some countries from leaving the dark ages behind.
Naomi Wolf’s prescient warning…
The police state creeps up on us, step by stealthy step. Every law, every restriction, is invoked for our safety and convenience. But a totalitarian state feeds on laws, twisting them to its own ends.
The Metropolitan Police has been found guilty of a health & safety violation. It doesn’t seem all that sorry, though.
When Metropolitan Police officers murdered Jean Charles de Menezes in July 2005, they were in breach of health and safety regulations, a court has decided.
It’s surprising anyone needed a court case to decide that — the slaying of an innocent man wouldn’t strike many sane people as good practice in the workplace. All the same, the Met Police pleaded not guilty. Now it’s having to pay a £175,000 fine and £385,000 costs for its failings.
Sir Ian Blair, the Met’s Commissioner, reiterated that he’s not resigning over the affair. He did offer the family and friends of de Menezes another apology, but it rings somewhat hollow.
The problem is that authorities like the Police often have grossly skewed values when it comes to their own behaviour. It’s a given that police forces will always take whatever powers they can grab, because they always perceive their work to be so important that it overrides any other considerations — such as freedom of speech and other civil liberties. That’s why we have to be so cautious about granting new police powers: after all, society is not run for the benefit of the police — it is their function to serve us.
At the same time as making the apology, Blair also made excuses.
“As far as we know, this is the first time that such legislation has been applied to fast moving police operations where the public are in danger,” he said.
This is a trick often used in the co-called ‘War on Terror’. What danger was he referring to, exactly? As we lose our freedoms and walk slowly but surely towards a police state, it is to the sound of the powers that be wailing of the threat to those same liberties from terrorists. It’s all for our own good, apparently. But where is this threat?
Terrorism is real and must be fought. But what we suffer from most is the threat of terrorism, and the greatest damage being wrought on our society is coming from those who claim to protect us.
“The difficulties shown in this trial were those of an organisation struggling, on a single day, to get to grips with a simply extraordinary situation - its greatest operational challenge in a generation,” added Blair.
What situation? A plumber going to work? The mighty Met Police can’t deal with that? A man catching a Tube train is the “greatest operational challenge in a generation”?
The Met Police screwed up and its incompetence resulted in the murder of an innocent man. Blair and his organisation should have the decency and honesty to admit that, not hide behind these self-aggrandising lies.
