Save the children from these freaks

There’s more evidence of both Anglicanism’s decline and the cosy relationship between church and state in this week’s Manx Independent.
An article (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/west-news/Sam-welcomed-to-cathedral-youth.5656601.jp) announces that Sam Rothcell was recently commissioned as a youth worker at the Cathedral.
So far, so what, if he was just pestering kids whose parents drag them to church, but the disturbing news is he seems to have a licence for child abuse at the Peel primary and secondary schools.
Would members of other crazed cults be as welcome? If not, why this one?
Another unsettling revelation is that he’s already working with Scripture Union Ministries Trust, which is well under the thumb of the island’s most fundamentalist church (which is in turn run by a US megachurch). There he co-ordinates 15 other ‘youth workers’ who are allowed the free run of island schools.
Having bumped into a few of these, it staggers both me and work colleagues that people who seem to be borderline mental retards are allowed close to small, vulnerable kids. But that’s our wonderful education system for you.
St Thomas’s primary school, the island’s only Anglican school, is also being run by a fundamentalist, due to no Anglican teachers applying when the previous head teacher retired last year. This one attends a church where you’d need at least one screw loose to be a member, and to have absolutely no moral scruples to stay once you’re aware of some of the goings on.
All in all, not a happy situation.
There’s an obvious problem when folk who are little (if any) better than smack dealers are allowed into Manx schools.
But when a church which was, at least, once a benchmark for Christian decency is reduced to hiring help from the evangelical lunatic fringe to abuse kids…..!

Freak alert

I think the island might have an infestation of Scientologists.
I’ve seen some guys dressed like comic book FBI agents stopping folk in the street over the last couple of weeks but just assumed they were Morons (sorry ...Mormons!), now I'm not so sure.
Today we had a copy of a leaflet entitled The Way To Happiness through the letterbox. It looked cheesy enough to be religious, despite the ‘non-religious’ claim on the cover, so ignoring all the bumpf inside I cut straight to the inside page credits.
Even worse than I thought, as the author is given as L. Ron Hubbard. So it’s a Scientology scam then.
I’ve just had a horrible thought.
Does this mean the island is going to be invaded by Tom Cruise, John Travolta and the rest of the Hollywood prat pack? Let’s hope not, though that would be just the grade of celebrity dingbat we do attract on past records.
Why is it all our half-decent celebs pop their clogs, get driven mad by parochialism or just get senile? (By the way, that’s George Macdonald Fraser, Andy Kershaw and Norman Wisdom, who I assure off-island readers was a sweet little geezer who’d make time for anyone before his demise). Meanwhile we give the Bee Gees the freedom of Douglas and it can only be a matter of time before the one that lives here is made an MLC.
And why not? He’s already an egocentric waste of space with no link to the real world, so he’d fit right in.

Media studies for beginners

Absolutely everything that’s wrong with the Manx media is typified by a front page item in this week’s Examiner.
Apparently:
"Manx Radio has revealed a new logo in what it describes as its ‘biggest image change in its 45-year history.’"
If nobody up at Radio Cowshed has worked out yet that radio is not actually a visual medium that explains the crap that they pass off as 'programming'.
On the other hand, that the local newspaper puts this on the front page suggests they have a few problems with the concept of newsgathering too.

Back to school

Well, a few days into the new school year at a new school for our lass and my wife has a 9 AM phone-call at work from the acting Deputy-Head.
It’s assembly time, and she’s read our note that if The Prodigy has to sit through religious guff she should be allowed to just sit quietly instead of praying or otherwise actively participating.
“I wanted to be clear. Can she actually attend the assembly?”
“Is there an alternative, such as a teacher to sit with her or other non-attenders?”
“Well, no. She’s the only one. Other parents never ask.”
“So, as you’re telling us there’s no alternative I think you’ve answered your own question. We have no problem with her learning about world religions, just don’t make her pray, and don’t embarrass her when she doesn’t. OK?”
I have to admit, while amused at the inability of the largest junior school in the North of the island to respect a child’s rights and meet their legal obligations, we’re astonished that, for once, a teacher actually read the note. Also amused that, while there is no teacher available to sit with her for 10 minutes as she happily reads a book, there’s always a posse of them to childmind the dingbats who come in and run a lunchtime Bible club.
Oh well. I suppose that’s a start. Only took three years. Christ on a bike, give them another decade and they’ll be noticing 95% of the kids aren’t even from churchgoing homes.
Actually, what’s more pathetic is that in a school of around 200 kids we’re the only parents defending our child from spook-chasing ignoramuses. But I think I know why.
The truth is, for all the carefully edited press releases each summer about a handful of kids getting a stack of ‘A’ grades, the Manx education system fails most kids. A hundred or so get away to uni every year, and most won’t come back. The rest will be lucky if there are enough unskilled or semi-skilled jobs to go around for more than a few years at a time, because the only thing they were really taught was to know their place.
And worst of all, having been made to feel like scum by teachers, politicians and educationalists in their school days, when they have their own kids and send them to school they lack the confidence to demand a better deal for the next generation, or even that schools deliver the little the law says they are entitled to.

Marking the UN International Day of Peace on IOM.

I’ve received the following message, which I’m happy to publicise as I have a lot of time for the sender, Carol Jempson.
Carol was chair of Isle of Man Freethinkers, but stepped down to concentrate on other things. For example, she’s tackling the embarrassing stink of Manx anti-Semitism by trying to educate locals about her own roots, which, in the process, will probably help newer cultures to integrate into Manx community with less folk myths or theo-fascist baggage.

The message is:

Peace in our community and our world.
For a moment, please consider a word… peace.
Or the absence of peace and what defines it. It is an absence of personal trauma. It is an absence of conflict. It is about creating an environment that is harmonious within us and within our communities.
On Saturday 19 September 2009, Carol Jempson and Pamela Birnie invite everyone in our amazing community to gather together to mark the United Nations International Day of Peace.
Join us anytime from 8pm for an overnight candlelit vigil around the war memorial on Harris Promenade, Douglas. You can join us for as long or as short a time as you would like. We even hope to have some singing!
Please bring a candle in a glass with you and, of course, wear warm clothes.
We have received wonderful support from our community protectors (Constabulary/Civil Defence/Fire & Rescue Service/Ambulance Service).
If you can’t make it to the vigil, remember that you can promote peace by:

· Developing your own inner peace: with your families, work colleagues, friends and community. Make a strong effort on Peace Day to compliment rather than criticise.

· Committing to a special project in your area that incorporates Peace Day values.

· Encouraging others to join you.

This is not a fundraising event, there will be no collections and no-one will be expected to make a donation.
Let each of us on the Isle of Man make the International Day of Peace a day to remember.
Spread the message of hope and strive for the best in mankind.

N.B. I should say that I removed one sentence with a link to a 'charity' website controlled by evangelical freeloaders.
While Carol may have decided that it is necessary to work with these parties in order to break down prejudice, on principle I will not publicise the pathetic efforts of bigots who, having created social division by their ridiculous prejudices, then seek public funds under the pretence of trying to ‘help’.
The ‘problem’, I would suggest, originated in their heads alone, and should have been solved there, not inflicted on others.

No Paseran!

Well, as I said in the previous post, I’m back.
Actually, I’ve been back over a week but was re-adjusting to Kipper Republic reality and thinking through all I’ve seen and done while away in Hungary. I’ve been looking through stuff like the local free papers piled on the doormat, or the weekly NSS ‘Newsline’ (previously a small source of sanity in a deluded world) and I feel like a Martian.
For example, contributors to a National Secular Society forum reduced to suggesting that a ‘protest’ by a bunch of BNP rejects, the English Defence League, might count as a legitimate one against an alleged future threat of English ‘Islamofascism’. I can’t even be bothered writing in, just look at any of the ever reliable Richard Bartholomew’s work on such topics – e.g. http://barthsnotes.wordpress.com/2009/09/06/edl-again/ or http://barthsnotes.wordpress.com/2009/09/04/english-defence-league-interviewed-by-veteran-us-anti-gay-bigot/ and work it out for yourselves.
But even before returning from Hungary I’d decided this blog has to change direction.
What I saw there was a growing threat from fascism caused by a corrupt government which pretends the working class no longer exists. The inevitable result is that powerless people turn to the false answers of the only folk who claim to care (i.e. neo-nazis and the churches) who feed off each other’s lies and pick on the same culprits (foreigners, the undeserving poor, gays, uppity women….). What depressed me more was seeing intellectuals (even Jewish ones), while not joining the outright fascists for obvious reasons, going along with the general analysis.
Is this sounding familiar?
The thing is, I’ve long argued that religious evangelicals (Christian in the Manx case) and fascists work the same way and feed off the same targets. They see a breakdown in society (real or the result of media who’d rather jump on an easy myth or parrot a government PR handout than do the research), people who feel vulnerable or afraid, and they leech on it. They bang on council house doors and offer false hope, while those I’ve looked to recently as allies shudder at the very thought of a council house.
Saddest thing is, I grew up on those estates too and should know better. My grandparents all left school at 14, my parents at 15, not from choice but from class and religious prejudice.
My godmother – brilliant at maths but couldn’t get a scholarship at 13 ‘because a Taig would only go and waste it’ then spent her life book-keeping for middle class dullards.
Her dad – fought off Loyalist thugs in Edinburgh streets and got a Jewish kid out of Czechoslovakia in 1939 by pretending to be her uncle, then turned down the foreman’s job at the brewery where he worked (owned by her real uncle) rather than help the boss keep his workmates in line.
My paternal grandfather - who taught me you always fight fascists, but not foreigners or others of your own class, after having his life saved in World War One by a German.
My paternal grandmother - a Sally Army street preacher in the 1920’s when, as a single woman, she couldn’t even vote - never mind preach in a ‘proper’ church.
My wife’s grandfather, conscripted into the Hungarian Army in 1944 and sent to the Russian Front – only documents recently released from the Russian hospital where he died, having never fired a shot, revealed he’d been a secret Communist Party member throughout the fascist Horthy regime era.
I could go on, but you get the point. Couple of degrees and a whiff of a smug Oxford biologist’s generalities and I’m laughing at my own heritage, not nailing the bastards who keep others down.
Well not any more.
From now on I don’t confuse class with ignorance, and don’t deal in generalities concocted by those who want to hang on to power and repeated by those too lazy to ask questions.
But I will devote time to explaining how scams like Freedom to Flourish are used by the Manx government, religious interests and corporate bodies to destroy real community and replace it with astroturf (pseudo ‘grass roots’ activity) controlled by them.
And I will blog more on those who fight back against fascism (secular or religious), be it in East Europe, the Middle East or far nearer home.
Speaking of which, the International Campaign Against Honour Killings website (see sidebar) is down for maintenance, having been attacked so often.
ICHK should wear such attacks as a medal. Unlike many of us cyber-dilettantes, it seems they are having a real world effect.

Never a copper when you need one

Well, I'm back, and spookchasing parasites take note: my tolerance of you has now hit zero.
Today, as I hurried down Ramsey’s Parliament Street on domestic duties, a Moron missionary tried to block my path. Our conversation was brief and, for him, unproductive.
“Good morning sir, I have good news for you.”
“No thanks, I’m not interested.”
“But sir, I don’t think you know what I’m offering.”
“I do. Racism, sexism, homophobia, outright lies and an empty wallet. Did I miss anything? No, thought not. Now fuck off and get a job.”
By the way, this happened bang outside the police station, so here’s a word of advice for our new, community conscious police while I’m at it (as you claim to be so interested in public feedback).
Stop fannying about with fundie throwbacks in broom cupboards and get these beggars off the street. It’s what I pay you for, and after all, unlike you, I won’t be retiring in middle age on a fat pension.