Soon to be banned by the wierdly bearded near you..

The jailing of fundamentalists for a planned arson attack on the publisher of a book about Aisha, Muhamed’s child bride, is as good as any excuse to look at nutters worldwide who censor the discussion of religion.
Handily, Article 19 sum up the situation rather well in their June Artist Alert bulletin.
In 2005, for example, they published a report (Art, Religion and Hatred; Religious Intolerance in Russia and its Effects on Art ) on the way that the Russian state has sided with religious extremists, often using vague interpretations of law meant to prevent nationalist extremism – which is a sick joke when you watch Russian Orthodox beardy weirdies ‘helping’ the police to bash anyone in sight at Pride events.
Article 19 say, “Police and security services can use vague legislation such as the 2002 law, as well as legal loopholes to instantaneously arrest and detain artists and close down exhibitions.”
The inevitable effect has been that artists now tend to self-censor rather than take risks.
Meanwhile the trial of Yury Samodurov and Andrey Erofeev over their Forbidden Art 2006 exhibition at the Andrei Sakharov Museum has resumed again. It kicked off two years ago because a nationalist religious organisation, Narodnyj Sobor, submitted a formal complaint. Samodurov and Erofeev face five years inside on charges of inciting religious and ethnic hatred under Article 282 of the Russian Penal Code for exhibiting works including a crucified Lenin and Mickey Mouse as Jesus.
If you need an easy comparison, Manx sculptor Michael Sandle exhibited a massive Micky Mouse with a machine gun at the Imperial War Museum at the time of the first Gulf War. He did that with the aid of a substantial grant, at the invitation of the museum management and (if I recall rightly) without even one rabid Tory asking questions in the House.
Elsewhere this year it is also religious conservatism hand in hand with bad government creating legal nonsense.
A Turkish court has allowed a case to be brought against author Nedim Gursel for “insulting religion” and “inciting hatred”. Gursel is on trial for his book The Daughters of Allah against which a case was brought earlier in 2009 on the above charges. Turkey is already infamous for charging many authors, including a Nobel Laureate, under laws that prevent “insulting Turkishness”, but Gursel says that the religious establishment has become the bigger threat against freedom of expression.
But even these cases pale beside the Iranian situation. Here (as if anyone needed it) is reason number one million and, oh, say 99 for not moving to Iran.
Article 19 reports solemnly:
“According to an International Publishers Association investigation, since the election of President Ahmadinejad in 2005, censorship within the Iranian publishing industry is clearly on the rise, with decisions about what gets published becoming more unpredictable, uncertain and arbitrary.
”Although the number of titles is slowly rising, the average print run is now only 3,000 compared to an average of 10,000 in the 1970s. This is entirely due to censorship. The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (MCIG) never officially bans books. Rather, if an author does not hear within two years, they understand that their manuscript has been rejected.
”In Iran, an author must obtain permission to print from the MCIG and a licensed publisher must obtain separate permission to distribute. In some cases the author gains permission to print, but the publisher does not gain permission to distribute.”

Tynwald Day for Dummies

Tynwald Day is the Manx National Day, and is celebrated every year on 5th July except on the years when it is celebrated on other days instead. In the years when it is not celebrated on 5th July, then 5th July is a public holiday to celebrate Tynwald Day and nobody has to go to work and Tynwald Day is another public holiday which isn’t on 5th July when nobody has to go to work.
This year it is celebrated on 6th July because 5th July was a Sunday, when, being a Christian country (according to the church) we should all be in church even though (according to the Manx church’s most optimistic figures) over 95% of us never go to church and (according to the census) many of us are not even Christian. In addition, roughly 10% of the 5% who do attend church are off-island tourists recorded entering churches to attend tourist board promotions and the majority of the 5% are relatives and friends there to attend funerals or weddings, or government officials there as a job requirement to attend state events which, being a Christian country, we always hold in churches instead of appropriate venues.
The other reason that the ceremony cannot be on a Sunday is that, again being a Christian country, the ceremony cannot begin until the politicians (many of whom are also not Christian) have attended the church service which precedes it and isn’t legal until they go back into the church after the ceremony for another ceremony. Even though, as various senior church figures keep saying, the ceremony that looks like a church service after the ceremony isn’t actually a church service but a legal sitting of Tynwald. If those church services also had to be on a Sunday, they would clash with all the other church services at least 95% of us would not be attending.
If it wasn’t a legal sitting of Tynwald, though held in a church, there would be no need for the church to be involved in national ceremonies like Tynwald, because there would be no link between church and state (even though the church strenuously insists it has no undue influence in matters of state), although if there was no link between church and state there would also be no excuse for a bishop to participate unelected in Legislative Council. If he wanted a say in politics he would have to stand for election, just as ordinary members of the public do and all the other Members of Legislative Council don’t.
Nevertheless, my family attend the Tynwald Day Fair every year without fail, though neither religiously nor patriotically. It’s a national holiday anyway, so islanders either choose to go and watch a bunch of turnip bashers in bad suits ponce about with whichever Royal inbreed Buck Pally sends over or stay at home and get drunk while watching daytime TV.
It’s a bit like Glastonbury. If you time it right, you can spend the day sniggering at stalls and exhibitions manned by every two-village-idiots-and-a-scabby-mutt wacko ‘good cause’ that can get charitable status without once being inconvenienced by the main freakshow. Homophobes for Africa, Christian Property Developers for East Europe, Pastors for the Rain Forest, Vegetables for Jesus, Kipper Curers for Hitler…..whatever, we have them all.
Out front, the main ceremony is a man in a home-made town criers outfit reading out all the laws passed in the year on a small mound topped by a tent containing the island’s politicians. This happens once in English then again in Manx in case you didn’t fall asleep the first time.
By the way, text books on Manx history solemnly tell us that Tynwald Hill contains a sod from every parish. Curiously, they never mention that most of them are drunk, senile, or both.
Normal people have only woken up long enough to participate in the Tynwald ceremony twice in history.
Once, over a century ago, they threw clods of earth at a particularly unpopular governor. Being idler than our forefathers, these days most people think ‘Sod the Governor’ but we can’t be bothered to actually do it any more.
In 1991 the ceremony was also briefly fun when Outrage dropped in to protest against Tynwald’s continued delay in partially legalising homosexuality. That doesn’t appear in any history books yet, though from time to time one of our oldest hacks grumbles about it in a weekly newspaper column which is constructed from whimsy and old wee in roughly equal proportions.
Curiously, while such hacks and their drinking buddies consider Outrage as, well…..outrageous, they have nothing critical to say about the Chief Constable from that era, a particularly vicious specimen of the breed who, before being banished here, was to James Anderton in Manchester what our current bishop, before his own exile, was to John Sentamu in York. We’ve also had a governor who, before his exile, oversaw RAF carpet bombing of Iraqi civilians in the first Gulf War and played a key part in the Saudi arms deals which never quite got investigated by Blair’s government and, after his exile, used his official residence to play host to fellow arms dealers from the US posing as ‘old military aquaintances’.
Sometimes the English wonder why we’re not grateful for their contributions to Manx culture. I am, thought it is fair to say that Manx culture would still be funny enough without them.

The national fun deficit

Seeeing reports of various Pride events around the UK yesterday I can’t help but compare things on the Isle of Man.
A public figure even tentatively suggesting the island, say, held a panel discussion on combatting homophobia in workplaces and schools would be beaten to death with rotten kippers, and a full blown Pride parade would be right out. Interestingly though, it is ‘officially’ our national day today, so it seems reasonable to point out that, even for the year’s biggest party, there isn’t a lot of fun on offer.
The Tynwald ceremony itself will be held tomorrow (more here on our annual national disaster on the day itself). This also means a week of plastic patriotism meant primarily to separate ‘homecoming’ Yanks from their wallets.
For example, just streets away as I write Ramsey National Week began yesterday, and what a bundle of laughs that is.
Here you can witness ‘themed decoration of town shops and business premises’ commemorating “100 years Anniversary of the Ellan Vannin Disaster”. That’s a party to celebrate the ferry to Liverpool sinking a century ago, and the fun continued with a concert and talk last night at Ramsey Heritage Trust’s premises, Quayle’s Hall. This was the only cheap and cheerful place to hold birthday parties and community events until it was stolen from the community by a government underwritten project which researches… I don’t think anyone knows really, but witch-burning, sexual offences involving sheep and other pre-industrial traditions probably feature highly on the agenda.
Then we had a Northern Masonic Open Day and the launch of a CD of Maritime Hymns. Elsewhere a bunch of dilapidated wrecks tried to raise interest in the town’s biggest dilapidated wreck, Queens Pier, by wittering on about their childhood in the confused belief that today’s youth would want something similar.
This morning the hedonism continued unchecked with ‘Maritime Songs of Praise and Blessing of the Lifeboat’. There’s a clue to the expected age-range with the note that “Seats will be provided for those unable to stand”. Probably a good job the lifeboat crew are on hand to save any fossils who fall in the harbour then.
But there are bigger crimes against taste and decency to consider elsewhere today too. You can always tell the Radio Cowshed newsroom is shut at weekends and the unpaid religious broadcasting team are running the place. Take the invitation to go and take a look at the Manx Churches Flower Festival (see http://www.manxradio.com/newsread.aspx?id=37094), officially known as the Manx Heritage Flower Festival but totally run by godbotherers at the Tourist Board who guide a committee of other church people.
To be fair, it’s a pleasant enough event if you need something to entertain a doddering, flower-fancying friend or relative. What IS interesting is the sly way visitor figures are fed into church attendance figures.
Being a Tourist Board event, where the civil servants have to to justify the public money, there’s an obsession with numbers. Folk at the doors of participating churches are issued with little clickers to press every time a visitor enters. As there are 17 venues and most try to visit at least half, the single total figure the Tourist Board rolls out representing all visits to all venues is misleading anway.
It gets even sneakier when, as the only safe attendance figure for a church event, the numbers at each venue are added by clergy to weekly figures which also include, say, scouts and guides, hire of the church hall and numbers at weddings and funerals. These weekly figures for all churches are then totalled each year, then divided by 52 to produce ‘average weekly attendance’, which can be passed off to the casual observer as ‘Sunday attendance’.
I know this from once being conscripted to the festival committee to help broaden the appeal (church leaders blocked secular venues and that was the end of that, by the way), and I got a detailed picture of the way churches change the counting method every few years to hide plummeting Sunday worship figures while subbing a Manx Anglican diocese newspaper for a newspaper chain.
To be fair, a town of 5,000 is never going to book Madonna, and it gets slightly better when local kids provide their own entertainment during the week. Still, the idea that everything from local to national government money (e.g. arts council and heritage grants) gets chucked at this, yet we can’t organise a half decent event for kids or families or manage even basic debunking of racist, sexist and homophobic myth because an evangelical halfwit might object, is, frankly, pathetic.

Spuds, bibles and political red herrings

I usually have time for the Celtic League, and especially Bernard Moffatt, who has put his neck on the line for numerous vital but unpopular causes over the years. His work getting NATO and the MOD to ‘fess up over submarines getting entangled in fishing nets and causing loss of life and small vessels throughout the Irish Sea, for example.
I’m less sure about a recent action, though it is an interesting snapshot of the way Celtic nationalism, in trying to protect or revive national ‘tradition’, often gets tangled up in another ‘tradition’, religious belief.
On behalf of the Celtic League, Bernie has written to Jack Straw asking him to ensure the UK Prison Service provides access to reading materials and internal request forms in the Welsh language. This follows the jailing of Ffred Ffransis, a language campaigner who was not allowed to take his Welsh Bible into prison. Ffransis also claims he lived on spuds after being denied access to the vegetarian diet because he would not complete English-only request forms. Manx will see an in-joke here, but for off-island readers I should explain that locals refer to days of past hardship as the times when everyone lived on 'spuds and herring'.
I’d admit that, though a prisoners rights campaigner myself, this guy’s attitude doesn’t put him top of my list for letters to the governor. As you’ll see at http://www.thisissouthwales.co.uk/news/prison-eat-potatoes/article-1046359-detail/article.html support is very mixed in Wales too. And don’t those comments about Muslims tell you where some Welsh ‘patriots’ and ‘minority rights activists’ are really at?
His faith or politics in themselves are irrelevant, it’s more the way that godbotherering and nationalist lags try to portray themselves as ‘special cases’ who are every bit as likely as a Daily Mail ignoramus to regard other criminals as scum. I notice this Messiah Complex in animal rights and environmental campaigners too, though I find that old school peace campaigners, even when religious, are more humble. When inside they knuckle down and help illiterate prisoners with their reading, once out again they sign up as prison visitors and keeep up the good work.
But the historical relationship between Manx nationalism and the church is every bit as entangled, ugly and confused. It is no accident that the earliest Manx language document is the Bible. When Bishop Wilson had the Bible translated to Manx I’d argue it was a way of getting the rabble (fond of rioting against the enclosure of island land at the time) to knuckle under to English clergy, not to spread sweetness and light.
Similarly the island’s public school, King William’s College, while one of the first specimens of the tradition was set up originally as a training college for clergy. Again, a way of picking off the brightest locals & setting them up as a 19th century mandarin class, which is no different to colonialism elsewhere. While the church is always trumpeting its role in early Manx education, schools here in the 19th century were founded less to educate the poor than as a form of cheap child minding by the church while parents were flogging themselves to death in the fields, mines and model factories.
After spending the late 1980’s scouring local history for magazine articles I’m also amused at the way in which it was the churches who got most local ‘holy days’ and parish knees-ups abolished (officially because they ‘encouraged drunkenness’), and when local employers paid for new churches the clergy colluded to use church attendance as a way to keep workers in line. For example, miners and mill workers whose names weren’t ticked off by the vicar each Sunday morning got no work on Mondays. As most of the Victorian and Edwardian texts on which 21st century whimsy about ‘Manx culture’ is based were written by clergy, it is hardly suprising we don’t hear all that.
Young Manx nationalists (at least serious ones, e.g. Mec Vannin members) are more savvy these days, but even in the late 1980’s I was startled by geriatric ‘if only Hitler had won’ merchants. So the biggest joke may be that the Manx Home Rule campaign was led by a Jewish Scouser, Samuel Norris, who came here as a young reporter in Edwardian times and ended up using the paternalism of Westminster government to overthrow the home-grown colonialism which held the island back until the 1950’s.
Now there was someone who knew how to hoist bigots by their own petards. In Manx Memories and Movements he relates how, using the tradition that every prisoner’s relationship with his chaplain is private, he persuaded the local vicar to ‘adopt’ him as one of his flock, then used him to send correspondence back and forth to those running what was, effectively, an anti-poll tax campaign run by seaside landladies in 1917. In contrast, he hints, families who probably even now consider themselves Manx patriots and models of morality made their fortunes from war profiteering, in particular fiddles involving the local internment camps.
Well, they do say patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. And that’s equally true of religion, so when they’re combined we should dismiss almost anything said as either lunatic ramblings or blatent lies. Blasphemers and satirists – now they’re people we can take seriously!

Angelic image, no earthly uses

It’s not often you see me backing a Manx clergyman, but I had to agree with Rev. Phil Frear’s letter in this week’s Indie (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/your-letters/Manx-Independent-July-3-2009.5425361.jp).
For off-island readers, the background to this was a court case to decide if one of those flashing ‘20’ signs outside schools constitutes advice or a legal instruction to motorists. Apparently it cannot be legally enforced.
But Phil’s one of the good guys, as I know from his work as the Nobles Hospital chaplain. It was Phil who, while not budging over the chapel, tried to open up hospital chaplaincy and religious input to the hospital in general to ‘all faiths and none’.
Sadly this offer hasn’t been taken up fully. Is this because NHS clientele are more downmarket than the departure lounge of choice for wealthy Rotarians, the Hospice?
I once took advice from Phil’s predecessor on setting up a hospital visiting scheme for us heathens. Unfortunately it seems our interest in self-determination becomes total disinterest when elderly, infirm atheists are under the weather.
When I tried to raise the matter the feeling was that we should leave ‘that sort of thing’ to the social services. If none of my fellow local heathens noticed that there aren’t any that might be why we’re not picking up new members; perhaps the current ones are too detached from most Manx people.
But this disdain for cash-strapped pensioners or folk from sink estates isn’t peculiar to atheists. The Interfaith Group and all ‘minority faith leaders’ listed on the government’s website or in the phonebook were scrupulously added to the faith community ‘guest list’ by public health officials when they were first advising on flu pandemics. Only the Interfaith lady turned up, and even she drifted off to ‘another appointment’ within 20 minutes and was never seen again. Similarly my offer to liase on health issues in future with minority faiths through the Interfaith Group was never taken up.
Meanwhile it seems every flakey fakir is setting up tent to flog crystals and other mumbo-juice at the Hospice. This, of course, cannot be because any dodgy potion or prayer you flog to a terminally ill person can handily be said to have ‘helped’ whatever happens, but will never be said to have contributed to the death of someone who would die anyway, with or without supplementing the quack’s (sorry ‘alternative therapist’s’) bank account.
A clergyman I know jokes that a parishioner once said to him: “You’re a real angel, but you’re no earthly use to anyone.”
I used to prize that as a description of bumbling vicars; it now occurs to me that it applies equally to many others.

Dead end religion, new rituals

Interesting piece yesterday by Diesel Balaam over on the Pink Triangle Trust blog (see http://ptt-blog.blogspot.com/2009/07/pop-star-has-died-boo-hoo.html).
Diesel uses the mourning we’re seeing after Michael Jackson’s death as a call for the non-religious to get into the debates over these new and ‘amateur’ ways people find to mourn because…..
Well, let’s cut to the chase. Because organised religion can’t get the job done any more but still butts in, begging bowl at the ready, trying to use our need to find better ways to grieve as an excuse for a ‘return to traditional values/family values/Christian values’….(cut and paste where you like, it’s all bollocks anyway).
It’s a topic us ‘sophisticated’ atheists have avoided way too long. Perhaps because the humanist/secularist/atheist establishment teaches us to ‘traditionally’ favour the hard sciences, while the important work on such topics is done by social scientists – semiology, cultural studies, sociology, social anthropology…. In fact, all that stuff I held down two jobs while studying at nights to get a chance to study myself as a mature uni student, then learnt not to talk about around secularists in case a chance reference to Foucault or Barthes caused biologists (or even English Lit types who couldn’t cope with basic post-structuralism) to explode.
Well sod that, because I’m interested too in the 'DIY' nature of new mourning rituals created by folk who have no 'official' means to express their grief. The AIDS quilts would be one example, but also the impromptu shrines after Diana, and those peculiar roadside shrines usually made by teenagers after a mate dies in a road crash. Then there’s Facebook memorial sites, or mourning by text messages because you can’t get to a funeral.
It’s all a long way from dressing in black, drawing your curtains when a neighbour dies, doffing your hat or standing still when a hearse goes past and a black-edged memorial notice in the local paper.
Not that there’s much wrong with bringing some of that back either. Maybe what we need is a move away from ‘funeral lite’ (e.g. running from work to a funeral in your lunch hour or just signing a card for the wreath and working on). Take the day off, mourn or celebrate a life properly and as appropriate to that individual (not just as it fits your employer’s and the local government crematorium’s schedules), then move on.
But Humanism (and Secularism) misses an opportunity to stress the redundance of religious ritual and the emotional and practical need for more appropriate 21st century ritual by not debating this with the general public. Even a friend who conducts perfectly respectful and professional non-religious funerals is still at pains to stress it's a 'proper' funeral, not just some hippy-dippy wierdness.
Diesel also touches on war memorials, which brings me to another example of a case we could use to stir up debate. The alternative is to write off an emotive issue which otherwise quickly becomes either a jingoistic irrelevance or another means for politicians to distract us from their failure to care for the living (including needlessly crippled vets and war widows from recent conflicts, of course).
In 2007, along with a local atheist ex ‘desert rat’, I started berating the government appointed and subsidised organisers of the Manx Veterans Day for actions not far short of treason. The first Veterans Day ‘celebration’ was, in effect, handed over to the churches and featured a full blown church service with five dreary hymns, prayers, a long sermon – not to mention the gilded ‘service sheet’ with the words to all hymns, responses to prayers - and so on. We wrote, quite politely, suggesting firstly that the churches already had an adequate chance to pray in the morning before the afternoon event, but at least in 2008 something more inclusive could be arranged – maybe cut out a couple of hymns, a minute’s silence instead of prayers and make a music show the main event instead.
The 2008 event was even worse. Not only were the hymns (still five) longer and drearier, but the sermon was upgraded to give the new bishop some free publicity. Some vets organisations weren’t even advised of the details, and most vets, too knackered by war crimes in the name of the bishop’s fictitious friend to hang on for the free buns and concert, voted with their zimmer frames and staggered home instead.
So, rather than the dignified but all-inclusive national celebration promised the nation got, as the ex-desert rat put it, ‘another bloody church parade’, or to use blunter squaddie vernacular, a bag of shite. If martial law had been in place on either day, I suspect the organising committee would have been taken out and shot.
In both cases these are events which stir up emotion and engage huge numbers of people, ignored because they are, somehow, ‘beneath’ us as ‘serious thinkers’. Yet the real tragedy is that ordinary people are constantly inventing new ritual because organised religion, even when aided and subsidised by the state, fails miserably to meet their emotional needs.
Isn’t this precisely where those interested in secularism should be working overtime -studying these rituals and in particular the use of new media or the reinvention of ‘outmoded’ ways to mourn – in order to fill the gap and take away all church excuses of ‘relevance’, ‘need’ and markets for new income or public subsidy?

Child abusers or lunchtime losers?

My daughter moves up to junior school in September, and last night was that school’s open night for new parents.
All seemed fine until we noticed ‘Bible Club’ listed amongst the lunchtime clubs. Most of the others are harmless enough pursuits (penny whistle, choir, folk dancing…) run by interested teachers, so there may just be a biblebasher on the staff helping the spawn of other addicts to regress even faster. Or it could be something more worrying.
A couple of weeks back, on the page in our local free paper where an idle sub pastes uncut copy from dodgy ‘charities’ passed off as ‘community news’, the Southern Rednecks (Port St. Mary’s ‘Living Hope Church’) had their latest plan for world domination. In addition to stealing from the dispossessed in other countries and raising new Manx cathedrals to pig-ignorance, this includes more schools workers for the Scripture Union.
On the one hand, it astonishes me that an island this small can fund so much cretinism, and that local government is so incompetent it isn’t weeded out at the planning or grant application stage. On the other, teenage Manx Baptists lack the numeracy to spot the sell-by date on Tesco tins and are too illiterate to fill out a benefit form, so I suppose their not-so-wise elders need to find something resembling employment for them.
In the past the SU was just wasted wet lunchtimes in secondary schools, where the kids are generally big enough to ignore them unless (as in the recent Castle Rushen case) they get pestered at home on private mobile numbers by a middle aged man too fat and ugly to seek extra-maritals from adult women. If these sad and sorry losers are now allowed to inflict their social inadequacy on eight year olds that is another matter entirely.
If the Education Department was responsible about this they would just add some new characters to the kind of comic strips which help small kids avoid other health risks. Then again, most of the worst health risks to Manx children already work there.