Let Us Prey

There’s an old joke about bureaucrats dealing with every disaster by forming a committee. Similarly, you will be relieved to know, Manx churches also intend to deal decisively with the current international financial crisis.
They are holding a Day of Prayer next Thursday. Not to be outdone, the Buddhists are also offering weekly classes in achieving ‘inner peace’ at £5 a go. Even funnier, the Buddhist nun running them used to be a chartered accountant!
The current Anglican Bishop’s invitation for all to join in is on the Isle of Man Newspapers website at http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/Day-of-prayer-in-light.4580653.jp if you want to know more, while the Buddhist bid for punters is at http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/Seek-inner-peace-with-Buddhist.4577670.jp .
One thing intrigues me – the Bishop says ALL Anglican churches on the island will be open. This is ambitious, given that most parishes of three or four small churches stagger by with a few lay clergy supporting one professional vicar.
Some years back, the Synod seems to have decided that not replacing vicars, combined with selling off their rectories as they retired, would be the best way to balance the Diocesan books. In theory, the full-time clergy are gradually replaced by ‘hobby vicars’ – generally retired people or professional types coasting towards retirement who have trained as lay readers. This saves on salaries and increases the conservative voice in Manx clerical circles, while simultaneously reducing that irritating tendency towards liberal views seen in Manx professional clergy who have been ‘in the business’ all their lives. Crikey, some of them even favoured lady vicars and weren’t homophobic!
Another point is that, by the Synod’s own admission, 52% of their churches are ‘surplus to requirement’. We know this from the 2004 Manx government document ‘Study of Places of Worship’ – described as 'a jointly commissioned report by the Department of Local Government, Manx National Heritage and the Diocese of Sodor and Man into the architectural, historical, structural and pastoral significance of local churches'. It caused some controversy when the guy commissioned to write the report inadvertently let slip information given him in confidence suggesting the Diocese might already be lining up buyers.
So is this a last bid for punters before the big sell-off? Or just religionists mining misery for cash as usual?

How To Win Government Friends And Screw Up Kids

A Department of Education press release today allows me to finally join the dots between various evangelical chancers with Manx government influence.
The press release puffs up 'The Story So Far' - Christian theatrics from The Lacey Theatre of Cardiff forced on any schoolchild who couldn't forge a sick note fast enough at the new Studio Theatre, Ballakermeen School.
Apparently it meets the National Curriculum requirements for understanding Christianity. So would studying the Holocaust with a professional history teacher.
The island owes this feast of fatuity to Bill Platt, self-styled 'youth worker' at Broadway Baptists, who apparently knew the late Robert Lacey, founder of the company.
Curious to know how much public money gets thrown at this kind of scam, I looked the Lacey Theatre up on the England & Wales Charity Register.
Suprise, suprise, one of their trustees - Norman Adams - is also a trustee of Care for the Family, whose Manx worker is involved in 'drug counselling' for the Manx Education Department and also the Chief Minister's Drug & Alcohol Strategy. This though the organisation has no formal charitable status on the island.
Having seen both CftF and Stauros (another evangelical 'drug project' operating on the island) in action I would say that their combined professional knowledge could safely fit on the back of a postage stamp and still leave room for BULLSHIT in block capitals. Yet under the latest proposals, such loons may be compulsorily foisted on not just kids but families who upset the temperance nazis. Be warned; three units and you meet your worst nightmare -a social worker with a bible!
And it gets uglier.
When Care for the Family started over here, it was via links with their Scottish and Northern Irish operations. Such sanctimonious timewasting attracts those 'charitable initiatives' whereby companies with a lousy reputation throw money at 'community projects' - often evangelical groups - in a cheap, tax-deductible attempt to look like they care. Their English and Welsh operations were even less clear, though on the face of it they were sad clowns, not serious bigots. Then the charity register threw up another suprise. One of CftF's other trustees, John O'Brien, is also a trustee of CARE ('Christian Action Research & Education'), notorious for favouring Section 28, opposing civil partnerships, counselling registrars how to plead 'conscience grounds' for not registering civil partnerships, and generally inflicting christofascist crap on anyone with the temerity to read books.
It is little known locally that the daughter of the last Manx education minister got a Westminster internship with CARE just after graduating, and Care for the Family's links with the Manx education system curiously enough began at about that time.
My attitude to an Education Department which invites dim 'religious charity workers' into Manx classrooms without background checks, allows knuckledraggingly cretinous Baptist cults to use some school premises for Sunday worship, but still finds it impractical for my child to sit out acts of prayer in one of the island's biggest, best-equipped infant schools has always been .................. somewhat tongue-in-cheek.
Knowing freaks like some of those mentioned above can not only be in the same room as my child, but get public money to try and make her as dumb as them, could make things far worse if I took them seriously.
Thankfully I will never have to, and make it quite clear that neither does she.

Pope and Bush say 'No' to stopping hate crimes

Well, life on the rock can be grim, and we only got rid of James Anderton's most famous protegee a few months back, but we never had it as rough as Kyrgyzstan, where lesbian and bisexual women and transgender men face violent abuse, including rape, both in family settings and from strangers on the street, Human Rights Watch said in a report issued yesterday.
But they also point out the Vatican and the US government are preventing an OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) program to combat hate crime and identity-based violence throughout Europe from including sexual orientation in the mandate.
Well, business as usual amongst godbothering throwbacks then.
Based on detailed interviews, the 49-page report, 'These Everyday Humiliations: Violence Against Lesbians, Bisexual Women and Transgender Men in Kyrgzstan',
tells of beatings, forced marriages, and physical and psychological abuse.
Several people interviewed for the report said they had been raped to punish them for not conforming to gender norms, or to “cure” them of their difference. One lesbian told how, when she was 15, her girlfriend’s brothers raped her brutally, saying: “This is your punishment for being this way and hanging around our sister.”
The police themselves sometimes abuse lesbian and bisexual women and transgender men, say HRW. And police have also raided and harassed organizations that defend the basic rights of these groups.
In all of Kyrgyzstan, only one shelter for survivors of domestic violence – run by a nongovernmental organization – helps lesbians or transgender people.
A sweeping law passed in 2003 should protect all victims of domestic violence. However, the report found that much more needs to be done to carry out the law, including training criminal justice officials to investigate domestic violence and educating the general public about the law’s provisions.
In some cases, officials have even endorsed hatred and violence. In 2005, a Ministry of Interior official said of lesbians and gay men at a human rights roundtable: “I would also beat them. Let’s say I walk in a park with my son. And there are two guys walking holding each other’s hands. I would beat them up too.”
Human Rights Watch called on Kyrgyz authorities to improve direct services for lesbians and transgender men; to train state officials in issues of sexual orientation and gender identity; to educate the public about domestic violence and sexual-rights issues, and to create measures for legal identity change to respect and recognize each person’s self-defined gender identity.
HRW also urged the OSCE to address human rights issues, including discrimination and violence against lesbians and transgender men, in its trainings for police and other programs in Kyrgyzstan.
“Programs to stop violence will not work unless they reach everyone who is vulnerable,” said Boris Dittrich, HRW's advocacy director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights Program . “Europe should not join Kyrgyzstan’s government in turning a blind eye.”
Well, Bush isn't European, and the Pope probably isn't human, so guess that leaves the rest of us to sort the mess out as usual.

Macho, Macho Mann

There was an odd letter about science and religion from an English vicar called Jonathan Willans in the Isle of Man Examiner last week, you can read it here http://www.iomtoday.co.im/your-letters/Examiner-September-30-2008.4540815.jp .
My good mate Jim Hawkins was bang on form and put him right, as you can see here http://www.iomtoday.co.im/your-letters/Examiner-October-7-2008.4561679.jp.
So I was ready to write him off as yet another clerical halfwit. Then I thought 'Why would an English vicar write to a Manx newspaper?'
So I looked further, and he's written to local papers way outside his parish before, here at http://www.hastingsobserver.co.uk/letters-to-the-editor/Your-Letters-July-13.3028576.jp , for example.
This was getting more intriguing - what cult was this prat from? Who funds him to write to UK regional papers, getting published apparently at random? Once I discovered a reference in an Edinburgh diocesan magazine linking him to something called Church Survey UK and looked that up things started to make sense.
On the surface he's just some vicar who surveyed 'grassroots Christians' for their views on where churches go wrong and why they're dying. But surely someone who did that would have to find, somewhere amongst all the nostalgic losers who just want England to be white, rural and innocent, Christians who stay away from church because they dislike homophobia or sexism. Wouldn't he?
Willans didn't. And if you go to http://www.churchsurvey.co.uk/?about to find out more about the survey you soon discover why.
It's that homophobic freakshow the Christian Party and their moronic mouthpiece the 'So Macho' Reverend George Hargreaves!
No-o-o-o-!!!!!!!!!
But I suspect that nice Reverend Jonathan Willans doesn't know the biggest joke - there IS a Manx connection with Hargreaves. He moved here on the proceeds of 'So Macho' and was so bored he ended up hanging out with the local pentecostals.
Yes - Hargreaves 'got God' on the Isle of Man. For which, yet again, on behalf of the entire population of the Isle of Man, I apologise profusely.

Homelessness, Sweet Homelessness

The Kemmyrk newsletter dropped through my door this week.
Kemmyrk (Manx Gaelic for 'Shelter') is the island's homelessness charity (in theory), and I was on the steering committee that set it up last year. In fact, I even named it.
But I doubt Kemmyrk could get accepted as a bona fide charity anywhere except the Isle of Man, because the hands of government and faith groups who now benefit are too obvious.
I got involved from the first public meeting - partly because I have a 20 year record of campaigning against Manx homelessness, partly by being the only person in the hall without a vested interest to volunteer, but mostly to ensure the parties planning to steer the venture could not just rubberstamp what had been previously agreed in private.
At least that one was a genuine 'public meeting', packed with ordinary people wanting to get something done. However, after another two months trapped in a room with rabid evangelicals I had great empathy with Alan Johnston.
At the second public meeting launching the charity the rot was setting in, with a last minute venue switch from a government building to the island’s biggest Baptist church. This meant evangelicals, not the general public, attended and duly elected their stooges to run the charity.
I left so depressed that I quipped in the next print column of Clinging To A Rock that perhaps now we needed a charity to protect the homeless from being exploited and humiliated by the Manx homelessness charity.
I still hung on in there, most importantly to ensure Kemmyrk and the government set up a database to which all relevant agencies supplied information via a questionnaire, which would gradually establish the real nature and forms of Manx homelessness, and demolish the folk myths peddled by faith groups trying to beg donations for non-existent 'community work'.
I was partly successful. The questionnaire model used was supplied by Shelter, and was detailed enough to reveal factors in homelessness like racism, sexism or homophobia, as well as government ineptitude or inter-departmental lack of communication. Then the 'invisible hands' whittled it down to a 10 question form, thus removing all evidence of their own role in perpetuating such problems.
The newsletter is worrying. It uses photos obviously lifted from US evangelical material,which suggest to me those involved favour the US model - run down public sector services and hand them over to churches as pay-off for the 'faith vote'.
It also mentions residents being 'invited' to join a community liason group for Kingswood House, the government building leased to Kemmyrk as a night shelter. Actually local residents and politicians demanded the committee to prevent repetition of the situation with David Gray House - the Salvation Army bail hostel - which Braddan Commissioners (local council) were astonished to find is being relocated to their area after the Department of Home Affairs pushed through planning permission without even consulting them.
Significantly, two David Gray House officials are now the chairman and secretary of Kemmyrk - though to be fair I proposed the secretary myself as at least he had the decency to turn up to some steering committee meetings and prove his worth! Also, to be fair to the local faith community, I know there are Christians involved in pushing for homelessness action as frustrated as me.
Still, there will be many Manx people in housing dificulty this winter, and neither government nor their puppet charity are likely to tackle the root causes - which, to me, centre on faith based bigotry and government 's lack of interest in doing their duty to any Manx citizen with a less than six figure income.

Mark Damazer - Turd Of The Day

The excellent weekly 'Newsline' from the National Secular Society today revealed what happened when someone wrote to the BBC to complain about a Thought For The Day broadcast which was even more biased than usual.
To the complainant's suprise, Radio Four Controller Mark Damazer replied as follows:

'In response to your query about Thought for the Day on Radio Four, this reply is on behalf of everyone at the BBC you have contacted.
TfTD is commissioned as a theological reflection on current events. It is not an opinion piece. All contributors are told to ground their 'thought' in their own theological tradition, using the words of scripture or liturgy that have been worn smooth as a pebble by centuries of repetition and devotion. Their authority is drawn from faiths that have survived the centuries, including periods of persecution and intense scrutiny and still proved themselves valid. It is therefore a unique voice on the BBC. I would contend that the BBC should strive to maintain its 'uniqueness' in an increasingly overcrowded market place and serve the audience by giving them a chance to hear a perspective from the great faith traditions that have shaped our society and continue to wield enormous influence over current events. So if you change the commissioning brief to allow in secular voices it would no longer be Thought for the Day and I hear no appetite for such a change from Radio Four. I do not accept that the majority of the country are [sic] atheistic or agnostic. The last census showed 71% declaring themselves Christian and another 8% spiritual. Since then with immigration continuing apace from countries more religious than our own I see no reason to think the religious majority has declined. In a survey a few years ago Radio Four discovered that one in four of its audience go to a worship service every week so we know there is a lot of interest in the subject. Secularism has not swept religion aside as some would have hoped, indeed some academics are writing about the new visibility of religion, albeit more fractured and fragmented than before. With religion so high on the agenda it would be a strange time to change the one place where it is possible to hear the intelligent religious voice in a secular setting and understand something of why millions if not billions of people still put faith at the centre of their lives. '

Jaw-droppingly stupid, but about par for the course for Damazer.
A couple of years ago, at the request of an octagenarian friend who got tired of hurling himself across the kitchen to switch stations when the Sunday Service came on, I organised the following letter to Damazer, which was signed by 24 Manx regular Radio Four listeners, mostly of a similar vintage:

'We are a group of dedicated Radio 4 listeners from the Isle of Man. However, even your excellent station could be improved, and even our dedication could be tested if it is not.
We write with a simple request for change which would considerably improve our lot.
Would you consider giving non-religious listeners a long-wave opt-out at 8.20 AM on Sundays?
Many thousand loyal Radio 4 listeners are forced to choose either to turn to another channel or switch off when ‘Sunday Worship’ begins. For such unbelievers Radio 4 is essential morning listening.
The expense of filling this time would, we believe, be minimal. The return, in terms of new listeners attracted to your general programming but not inclined to hear sermons during breakfast, should be more than adequate compensation, '

He never replied, but then BBC service to the Isle of Man has always been rubbish. My friend was himself a Beeb reporter in the days when they wore dinner suits to read the news and saw it as yet more evidence of a once fine institution's slide into audiovisual excrement.
As it happens, I've had previous experience of poor BBC quality -but at least then they got round to replying to my complaint.
When I found out senior BBC management were meeting 'faith leaders' to beef up religious broadcasting as part of an exercise called “Taking Belief Seriously”, I wrote saying (amongst other things):

'At a time when religious belief amongst well informed people has never been lower it is ridiculous to regard the 'problem' of emptying churches as a social ill which licence payers should be asked to help solve. It seems to me the problem of emptying churches is one for churches to solve, not society, and certainly not the vast majority of the UK public (who have rejected religious belief as too ridiculous and organised religion as too easy a hidey hole for those who seek to destroy democracy). In short, perhaps religionists should recognise that people simply have higher moral standards these days.
Pandering to the superstitious is an unacceptable policy for a publically funded body, and it is interesting to compare your total lack of interest when the non-religious complain about religious bias. For example, I note your failure to address problems with a programme you still laughingly call 'Thought for the Day', even though thought is remarkably absent from the contributions of the religious minority exclusively featured on that programme.
There are probably more regular illegal drug takers or alcoholics than churchgoers in the UK. Given the 'problems' caused to those 'misunderstood minorities' by drug education programmes, should we expect that, in the interests of fairness, the BBC will be meeting drug dealers and addicts worried that their source of delusion and income is under threat? It seems no more ridiculous than your response to those whose livelihood depends upon the peddling of religious mythology.'

They replied:

'As a public service broadcaster the BBC has a responsibility to meet the needs of all audiences. Over 75% of the adult audience claim some religious allegiance (2001 census).Much of the BBC's output approaches the world from a secular, non-religious point of view. A minority of the BBC's output has specifically religious content - some of it celebratory and affirming, some of it journalistic and scrutinising - while other programmes, such as Jonathan Miller's Brief History of Disbelief, have addressed atheism directly. On Friday 13 May the BBC Governors held a seminar, attended by Mark Thompson, senior executives and a panel of invited experts, to discuss the BBC's religious and belief programming. The BBC has a public service responsibility to provide religious programming. The purpose of this seminar was not to find ways of increasing religious output, but to discuss how the BBC can best meet this commitment by providing programmes of the highest quality. The seminar also explored how different faiths and beliefs could be reflected across a range of genres. '

But it gets worse than that. Consider, for example, the role of an organisation called the Churches Media Council on BBC policy. Their strongest influence is the Evangelical Alliance. One CMC protegee of the EA's ridiculous Joel Edwards not only 'advises' both the EA and the BBC on religious broadcasting but with another hat on is actually the BBC producer responsible for this year's gobsmackingly dumb telefilm of the Easter myth.
How much worse can it get?
My BBC licence demand arrived today, as it happens, which gave me my own Thought For The Day.
If Damazer ever replies to our letter I'll pay the price of the stamp towards the licence fee. If they put non-religious commentators on Thought For The Day (as Manx Radio have for years) I'll pay a quid. If they sack Damazer and tell Edwards and his knuckle-dragging friends to take a running jump I might even pay the lot in one instalment, rather than, say, 10p weekly at the local Post Office.
Maybe a lot more of us should consider action like this, until the Beeb starts providing what they say we're paying for.

Mock The Weak

The island’s ‘alternative medicine sector’ is in for a damn good mocking when Dara O’Briain gets here on November 6th.
As you'd expect with a place which attracts tax-dodgers, there's a growing industry in quasi-religious bottom-feeders flogging aromatherapeutic tat to the richest and thickest at a massive mark-up. (How much does a box of Woolies candles and a box of matches cost, fer feck's sake?)
The acerbic ‘Mock The Week’ host made his views on these shabby shamans pretty clear in a Manx Independent interview on October 2nd, and promised to devote a section of his Villa Marina show to cutting such charlatans down to size.
He told his interviewer: ‘I devote a section to railing against bad science and homeopathy and psychics and all that malarkey…..those topics get on my empirically minded tits.
I really hate it when people draw upon themselves the clothes of authority when they have never had the application to find out how things actually work.
They talk blithely about Eastern mysticism and the flow of chi through the body. Would it have killed them to find out where the kidney actually is before declaring that it is in your foot?’
On those grounds alone I'm only too happy to make Dara an Honorary Associate of the Manx Rational Response Squad – willing at a moment’s notice to stop wrong-headed purveyors of ‘Intelligent Design’ in their tracks and each capable of blowing out a roomful of Hopi ear candles with a single guffaw.
I'd love to go and watch these quacks get what's coming to them, unfortunately Dara’s show sold out almost as soon as it was first announced.
…..I could always try chanting for a ticket.....