Old joker, novel thinking

Barbara Smoker, the nonagenarian but still wickedly witty secularist, posted a beauty of a “thought” on the National Secular Society’s weekly Newsline a couple of weeks ago which I’m still giggling at. So much, in fact, that it would be mean not to share it.

“The pathological condition of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is the agreed diagnosis for those who feel they have to keep performing certain rituals in order to avoid some illogical misfortune.

But that definition likewise applies to people who belong to a particular religion and who assiduously practise its prescribed rituals.

Perhaps, therefore, we could use the term "religious OCD" as a telling synonym for fundamentalism.”

Maybe we should, Barbara. In fact, maybe I just will.

Philately funds the flat earthers

I blogged before on a nasty little deal cut between the Manx and Vatican Post Offices to profit from Benny the Boy Nazi’s pointless UK holiday. Seems from the latest follow-up
(see http://www.manx.net/default.asp?id=18&articleid=11362 ) that at least the Manx one no longer wants to give the game away.
Maybe they’re taking note of growing public anger, rather than excitement, over a waste of over £100 million on security costs alone, most of which must be met by local authorities because Westminster views police spending as a ‘regional’ matter. Money, as many are saying, that means further cuts must follow in public services already being told to save up to 25%.
But, as I discovered yesterday, that hasn’t stopped our Post Office colluding with yet another bunch of right wing spook-chasers. If you take a look at http://www.iompost.com/stamps/FutureIssue.aspx?categoryid=203 you’ll discover (to your horror if you know them) that Ramsey’s best known purveyors of evangelical claptrap (and drain on public funds) have done it again.
As if the public money and helpful tax holidays for (let’s see now) building a film studio, ‘training’ film technicians (more accurately being subsidised to employ them for something like 60% of usual UK film industry rates even after ‘training’) and getting Education and Film Board support for the naffest cartoon series in history (hated by all except some pseudo-award from a Christian Concern for our Nation spin-off group) isn’t enough, now they’re flogging stamps?
It’s enough to make you give up posting letters for ever. In fact, I may just stick to e-mail until after Christmas, just to see if it works.
I was also saddened to find out that the Manx Gaelic translation of this borderline end-timer twaddle – paid for by Manx Heritage Foundation – is being undertaken by two folk whose stalwart work for the Manx language movement I used to admire.
I’ve come to expect nothing better from the Manx Heritage Foundation, but true Manx cultural workers used to be proud of being better read and in the frontline of any local fightback against bigotry and ignorance, so I hope this isn’t the beginning of a new trend.

Beardie bampot caught with pants on fire - again

Stephen Green, National Director (and some say only real member) of Christian Voice continues to claim that he and fellow fundie crackpots made Classic FM drop an advertising promotion for Eric Idle’s Not the Messiah film (see 'Idle vice' from last week for explanation).
This even after the station’s MD painstakingly put the record straight following Green’s boasts earlier this week.
Just last night the Birdshit (that’s a reference to a 'divine judgement’ delivered on TV by a seagull at one of his protests, by the way) sent his supporters an e-mail claiming:

”As you will already know if you emailed Darren Henley, the Managing Director of Classic FM, they quickly dropped the blasphemous 'Not the Messiah'. If you emailed or phoned or wrote, well done for standing up for righteousness.
There was apparently a storm of protest, and the result is a triumph for prayer and action, in which we give God all the glory.
The atheists, of course, are furious. After crowing over the weekend that Classic FM would take no notice of us, now they are moaning that Britain's leading classical music station gave in to us Christians.
Darren Henley is putting a brave face on it, of course, but the reality is, all and everything to do with Not the Messiah was expunged from their website within two hours of the office opening on Monday. Just to be clear, none of the false rumours which Mr Henley speaks of in his email to those who complained originated with us. And to give credit where it is due, he is right that in the run-up to Christmas, the station is a joy to listen to with Christian music dominating the output.
PRAY: Thank God for bringing this matter to the light and for this crucial victory.
The film of Not the Messiah was shown in cinemas last night. PRAY that the turnout was poor.”

Now why would these bampots need to pray? Surely, if their campaign was so devastating, there would be no audience anyway.
Certainly, Green’s boasts got a rise out of some in the secular humanist community - as it might, knowing Green’s previous success in stopping funds to a Scottish cancer charity that ‘offended’ him.
For example, the British Humanist Association put out a press release regretting Classic FM’s apparent cave-in to fundie bullying, and the station certainly took a stack of e-mails from outraged atheists who thought the same.
This caused Darren Henley, MD at Classic FM, to set the record straight in an e-mail by reply in which he said:

“Following an email campaign, a number of incorrect views about Classic FM’s involvement in this event appear to have gathered momentum in the online community and I hope that you will allow me to take this opportunity to correct them:
1. Classic FM broadcast an advertising campaign for this event which ran from last Wednesday until last weekend. The station also ran a competition to win tickets to the event on the station’s website which also ended last weekend. No further advertising activity was booked to run either on-air or online after the weekend.
2. At no point did Classic FM ever intend to broadcast this event on air, nor did it ever enter into any negotiations to broadcast the event on air, so any assertion that any programme content has been withdrawn from broadcast is simply incorrect.
3. Classic FM has never been a financial supporter of this event and nor was it ever the promoter of the live event – and that relationship has in no way changed over the past week.”

Now, who do you believe, Green or Henley?
And to end on a positive note, doesn’t this also prove that, whenever Green and his ilk try to stop us giggling at the more lame-brained aspects of ‘belief’, we can not only stop him, but enjoy doing so?

Once upon a time in the Western Isles

Guess what, our non-existent night life is an indirect cause of religious conflict up in the Western Isles.
On the other hand, one of the other consequences is that two of the most obnoxious fundamentalist fuckwits in the British Isles are at war with each other.
The war began when George Hargreaves, founder of the Christian Party and now (somewhat confusingly) running an outfit called the Scottish Christian Party from London, decided to run for office as the Western Isles MP. He’s using the dubious matter of Sunday ferry sailings as an excuse.
By doing so he’s upset the Western Isles resident religious bigot, Daily Mail journo John MacLeod, who presumably thinks only he has the right to profit from non-issues turned into religious controversy.
You can read and laugh at the whole sad story at http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/politics/holy-war-in-the-islands-as-religious-rivals-refuse-to-turn-the-other-cheek-over-christian-mp-1.923857.
But why has Manx night life got anything to do with all this, you ask?
The thing is, Hargreaves moved over here some years back on the profits of So Macho. Unsurprisingly, a producer of gay disco anthems who was also black fitted in like…............ well, he didn’t!
At the time most people either left the island to find life after dusk or ended up listening to dipso white flighters whinge at the golf club bar every night. For Hargreaves it got so bad he fell in with local pentecostalists.
Give the man credit though, he saw a market, got some correspondence course qualification as a clergyman and has never looked back. Thinking about it, it’s almost funny – a black man with a dog collar is the worst nightmare for all those South African losers the Manx government enticed here when apartheid fell apart!
Hargreaves has failed miserably as a Scottish political candidate once, being trounced in a Glasgow constituency by Patrick Harvie (green, gay and an NSS member too – how embarrassing).
MacLeod has an even longer record of mean-minded Calvinist shite-peddling. If I’m not mistaken, he features a few times in Sexual Fascism, Gary Otton’s excellent account of Section 28 skullduggery up in Scotland, and fairly certainly in a few of Gary’s postings at Scottish Media Monitor (see sidebar).
Frankly, this pair deserve each other, but the rest of the world deserves neither. The more each is confined to slagging off the other, the less we have to worry about the pair of them.

No faith? No hope, no charity

I was disturbed to read on the Manx government website yesterday that the Isle of Man is soon to host a British Irish Council officers group which is supposed to be ‘exploring the role of the ‘Third Sector’ in promoting social inclusion.’ Amongst the local examples the visitors are apparently going to hear about or visit are homelessness and befriending schemes.
According to Andrew Swithinbank, one of two Social Services clowns revealed in a Tynwald question last year to be on £100K + salaries:
"This is not just an opportunity for us to blow the Manx trumpet although we have a great deal to be proud of in how Government and the Third Sector are working together in the interests of vulnerable people. Rather it is an opportunity for mutual learning. We want to share with our colleagues from other jurisdictions the problems we have faced and the solutions we have found and the challenges ahead so that we can all learn how to build even better and stronger partnerships with the voluntary and community sector."
Well Andrew, it will take less than two minutes to explain we’ve failed miserably. Then what do you do for the rest of the conference?
You can read the pathetic bleatings of this overpaid underachiever and other chumps at http://www.gov.im/lib/news/dhss/officialsfromsix.xml, and I defy Manx readers to get past the first paragraph without laughing or swearing profusely.Seriously, if current Manx examples are being held up as ‘best practice’ for planned public sector cutbacks in the UK and surrounding islands that is pretty terrifying.
The simple truth is, in the last few years Manx public services (often third rate to start with) have been hacked away to the extent they no longer exist in any practical sense. All this has happened under the pretence of ‘partnerships’ with churches and other parasitical bodies which might have otherwise quietly died by the end of the 20th century through public disinterest.
Instead of just paying professionals to look after our disadvantaged competently, the government just slipped a few quid to the same faith-biased amateurs who caused the bigotry and general ignorance which held us back so many years in the first place. So now, unless you’re what some biblebashing dimwit (armed with digital technology but Dickensian attitudes) considers ‘the deserving poor’ you get no help. Under cretinous initiatives such as ‘befriending schemes’ run by evangelical throwbacks in our smaller communities pensioners who don’t attend church are now left to die alone and un-noticed.
For example a nonagenarian friend caring for a wife with Alzheimers moved to the UK earlier this year. It was the only way, given the handover of the relevant public services to village ignoramuses from the local chapel, he could be sure she would even get minimal care, such as the odd home help popping in.
Off-island readers – watch out for this nonsense. If such policies are ever adopted in your communities then at some future point the recently revealed Irish church-led abuse scandals are going to look like a model of social good practice compared to the total breakdown of public services you are about to experience.

Watch out, freaks about

While in the Co-op yesterday I passed the local bishop in the bread aisle.
I suppose the very presence of a bishop in a supermarket is itself evidence of a humbler new approach by the current Anglican area manager. His careerist predecessor ignored and was unknown to the entire population until he could sneak back off to London, and his predecessor was so old school he was never seen in public unless in full regalia, and I suspect he didn’t even know what a supermarket was as his wife dealt with ‘domestic matters’.
I may mock, but I seriously pity the task of any well-meaning Manx cleric as they just cannot win. It isn’t the disinterest of us rationalists which defeats them: it is the rapid ageing and dimming of the local Christian community.
Just before heading to the Co-op I’d quite by chance seen a passage in a P.G. Wodehouse short story which nicely sums up their predicament.
Wodehouse, always a shrewd judge of clergy, says of one of his regular characters:

“The task of composing a sermon which should practically make sense and yet not be above the heads of his rustic flock was always one that caused Augustine Mulliner to concentrate tensely. Soon he was lost in his labour and oblivious to everything but the problem of how to find a word of one syllable that meant Supralasarianism.”

(Gala Night in Mulliner Nights)

On re-reading the prominently featured ‘Easter sermon’ in this week’s local free paper to see if there was an ounce of sense in it (there wasn't, see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/Bishop39s-Easter-message-condemns-39digital.5152937.jp) I thought of that.
And today things descend into pure farce as the poor man goes paddling at Peel along with the freaks who put both the fundament and the mental into fundamentalism. See http://www.manxradio.com/newsread.aspx?id=34732 for more while it’s still up there.
It’s all very sad. Twenty years ago I worked on the little Peel paper and loved the town’s uniqueness. When I moved back here I wanted to live there, but now I thank my wife for talking me out of it.
The rot set in when Manx Heritage’s plastic 'history theme park', the House of Mananan, went up and the entire road system was ‘rationalised’ so that tourists could drive in to H of M, then out again to shop with Jesus at Stepford Central a few miles away without meeting a Peel resident. Businesses shut, property prices fell and the power balance shifted.
In my day community power may have been in the hands of Methodists and Anglicans, but they had a small town decency about them.
Just as a small example, there was one camp as a row of tents little guy who did all the flower-arrangements for big church events. He and his partner lived openly together in a town of under 5,000 before the Manx legalisation of male homosexuality and …nobody at church mentioned it. They were grateful for what he did to brighten up the church, and what he did elsewhere just wasn’t their business.
Then, so many businesses shut even the charity shops had to amalgamate. The nastier, US backed fundies moved in, buying seafront properties, opening ‘community facilities’ which have charitable status, pay no tax and force the closure of real youth and community projects.
In my second short spell on the town paper I was sent to interview raving lunatics who claimed to be curing AIDS and leprosy on their ‘foreign missions’, other nutters who home schooled their kids to keep them safe from ‘communists’…… It was so unbelievable and unprintable even my editor (himself an Anglican lay reader of conservative mind) turned white in horror.
These are the folks now running the town, and with so much political clout they can put on their Bampots on the Beach shenanigans and effectively close a seaside town to the general public on what should be a major public holiday.
Just go elsewhere. Even on the Isle of Man there’s no need to spend your hard-earned holidays at a fundamentalist freakshow.
13th April addendum
I just couldn't resist pointing out http://www.manxradio.com/newsread.aspx?id=34737 . You can tell the newsroom is still on holiday as the religious broadcasting gang who fill in on Sundays have slipped in the days old 'fantasy finance' sermon to try and fluff things up. Hilarious stuff -though as I've never met an evangelical who could count past ten you can't take the crowd figures too seriously.

Remember Du'a Khalil Aswad

Two years ago today Du'a Khalil Aswad , a girl of 17 from the minority Kurdish Yezidi religious group, was stoned to death by a group of eight or nine men in the presence of a large crowd in the town of Bashika, near the city of Mosul, northern Iraq.
Du'a Khalil Aswad's murder is said to have been committed by relatives and other Yezidi men because of her relationship with a Sunni Muslim boy and her absence from her home for one night. Her death by stoning took some 30 minutes and was recorded on video film, which was then widely distributed on the internet. The film shows members of local security forces present but failing to intervene or arrest those responsible.
In remembrance of Du’a, the International Coalition Against Honour Killings is making 7th April each year a day of action.
This year they have asked the public to contact the the Kurdistan Regional Government asking what progress there has been in finding and prosecuting Du’a’s killers, and what they intend to do to reduce the rate of ’honour’ killings in Kurdistan. There have been at least 300 other victims since Du’a’s death.
In the UK you can do this by e-mail to uk@krg.org or by letter to

KRG Representation in the United Kingdom
Winchester House,
8th Floor 259-269 Old Marylebone Road
London
NW1 5RA

But Kurdistan is not the only culprit. For example when NATO forces hand regional power to traditionalists as a means of sidelining the Taliban the first effect is increased violence against women, often justified by religious courts. And Channel 4’s recent Unseen World programme on Turkey revealed around 200 ‘honour killings’ in the last year - this in what is effectively an EU country!
Amongst recent victims in other countries there have also been at least two British citizens, but the UK government did nothing. Perhaps the victims were neither white, rich nor photogenic enough, or perhaps our politicians just think a tankful of petrol means more to us than a human life.
Then again, the phenomena is coming closer than that too. An International Womens Day conference in London this year heard that a hotline for victims of honour crimes and forced marriages set up by Cleveland Police in November 2007 had taken over 300 calls, while even sleepy Cambridgeshire cops averaged 30 calls per month when they did the same.
I'm sick of the way that when a dog gets mistreated Manx folk react like it's a war crime, yet we've turned a blind eye to domestic violence and child neglect which can even lead to death for decades because it's a 'tradition'.
So where does it stop? In future years is burning your kid alive for wearing make-up or answering back going to be passed off as 'tradition'?
Actually, it's not so far off that now, and I'm not talking about new residents or minority religions either.
Just a few months ago there was a tragic case involving friends of my small daughter. Their mother was self-harming badly and in serious danger of topping either herself or her kids due to the mental cruelty of their fundamentalist throwback of a dad. Not wanting to inconvenience a 'well respected' churchgoer, Manx social services did the obvious - sectioned the mum and left the kids with Dad. As if he even noticed their existence due to his 'preaching commitments'.
The MHK Quintin Gill showed the way a couple of months back, introducing a Bill to end an anomaly which, bizarrely, meant female genital mutilation was not previously a crime on the Isle of Man.
If enough of us speak up we can stop all this faith-based lunacy, before it leads to a local tragedy even our courts and social workers cannot hide from the world.

Ditch Dobson!

The Chicago based Museum of Broadcast Communications is about to induct into their Radio Hall of Fame an evangelical muppet who thinks Spongebob Squarepants promotes homosexuality.
James Dobson, best known as Chairman of Focus on the Family, also runs the biggest 'ex gay' ministry in the the US, supports intelligent design and even led the ousting of Rev. Richard Cizik, a fellow fundie, from the National Assocation of Evangelicals because Cizik had the temerity to suggest Christians should take global warming seriously.
Thankfully, the US gay community aren't about to let this fully fledged wingnut get his 'honour' without a fight.
'Dump Dobson!'is a joint campaign between the Gay Liberation Network and Truth Wins Out, which has exposed much of the twaddle behind Dobson's 'Love Won Out' scam. They're asking people to e-mail the Museum Director and sign up to a letter asking the Museum to think again. If that doesn't work they'll be amongst numerous Chicago groups who might make the awards dinner on November 8th just a tad unpalatable. Go to http://www.dumpdobson.com/ to find out more and get stuck in.