[300th Post] Make The Pope Pay

Do you think having a visit from the Pope is worth spending £20 million of your money? No? Well head over to the National Secular Society who have a petition to make the pope pay.

I don't care if the church pays, the pope pays or some rich person pays. It just shouldn't be the taxpayers - many of whom aren't Catholics.

Mayor Refuses to judge Halloweeen pumpkins

OK, Halloween is a fraud. There are no dark or evil spirits, just a chance to have fun, increase the rate at which children become obese, and get something tasty off of the old woman who wakes you up to the sound of Radio 4 every morning.

Except that the woman who wakes you up at such an ungodly hour is actually a mental, Halloween-hating Christian. Now the evidence for the dark side and the godly is equally scant, so I can only assume she uses one set of fairytales that encourage murder to stop my childhood self using a different set of fairytales to ask her for chocolate.

In fact she's almost as big a killjoy as the Mayor of Nuneaton, who for religious reasons refused to judge a pumpkin carving competition. We all know Halloween isn't Christian (some of us now Christianity isn't real either) - but as a mayor refusing to do something that pulls your community together is just wrong.

Psychics given Government funding

This is a pretty sad tale. Giving £4,500 to people who claim that they can talk to the dead. Creating jobs is a good idea, nobody would argue with that. Giving money to two likely frauds to con other people on the other hand is absolutely ridiculous. In the words of one member of the Welsh Assembly: "It is an utter disgrace that taxpayers' money is being wasted and given to an organisation that believes it can teach people how to communicate with the dead."

Incidentally, I can talk to the dead. They never reply though...

World's Most Respected People (According to Britain)

It may not be the best poll ever designed but I think it says enough. The top three are as follows.

1) Barack Obama

Good choice, it's great to have someone literate as "leader of the free world" again.

2) Nelson Mandella

Possibly should be at number 1 given his track record, but without doubt a worthy contender.

3) Jade Goody

EPIC FAIL. Britain I want to disown you. Yes, she has cancer and will die. That shouldn't be a reason for somebody whose only reason for fame is (1) being stupid, and (2), going on Big Brother, to rank higher than David Attenborough. Or even, well.... anyone else really.

Northern Ireland Troubles

It seems like there are troubles brewing in Northern Ireland. Recently Sammy Wilson, DUP Environment Minister, claimed that climate change is not due to the influence of our species. Now his DUP colleague, Mervyn Storey, has threatend the Ulster Museum with legal action if it does not stage a creationist exhibition alongside its forthcoming exhibition on Charles Darwin.

digging a bit deeper into the shadowy world of Mervyn Storey we find that he has already tried to get intelligent design (read: creationism) taught in schools.

Hopefully this lunatic will disappear in a giant failure, but then again.

UFO Athens

There seems to be lots of UFO stories doing the rounds at the moment. This one comes from Athens, but thankfully is a little more realistic than some reports I have read: "Greek officials say that the object, which was not detected on any radar, was probably a mistaken sighting of the planet Venus in the Autumn night sky."

There have also been reports of UFOs above the Houses of Parliament, and from Somerset (see video below).



Also it seems that someone has been collecting UFO reports from police officers.

Tony Blair on Religion

I have mixed feelings about Tony Blair. I remember the excitement he caused when I was at middle school about him becoming Prime Minister. Which is odd on two fronts: I knew nothing of any worth about politics, and as fas as I remember the school election was won by the Monster Raving Loony Party.

Since his departure from Number 10 Blair has been going on about god a lot. Most notably Blair was guided by an imaginary friend, voice or apparition when deciding whether to invade Iraq. This is not a good way to make such decisions. The decision to go to war is difficult, just as the decision not to can be difficult. That decision can only be made on the basis of the evidence available at the time.

But Blair seems to have continued on, and at a recent 'Prayer Breakfast' (who says there's no division between church and state in the USA?) he mention god over 3o times. Quotes such as 'The 21st century will be poorer in spirit, meaner in ambition, less disciplined in conscience, if it is not under the guardianship of faith in God' are find highly comical. It is the liberation from faith that seems to be driving moral progress.

Read through this article, it seems the UK thankfully isn't quite as bad as the USA yet!

Anonymous witnesses and 42 days

The British legal system is falling to pieces, and it worries me. Worse still, when talking to a close friend the other day, I realised that they didn't understand the purpose of having a legal system in the first place.

The legal system is not there to incarcerate or otherwise punish criminals, it is there to protect the freedom of the majority. It protects our freedom by punishing people who break rules that we, as a society, have, willingly and rightly, imposed on ourselves.

The legal system is there to ensure that we can retain as many freedoms as is feasibly possible while allowing large numbers of us to live together in something resembling order and harmony.

So we come to 42 days of detention without charge. You have to wonder if it takes 42 days to gather evidence to charge somebody what the quality of the evidence leading to their arrest was like. 42 days is a ridiculously large amount of time for this process. Canada has 24 hours. Even China, well known for being a bit over the top, 'only' has 37. Welcome to police state Britain.

Then we come to the decision of the Law Lords (those peers that are legally qualified) that evidence given by anonymous witnesses is to be disallowed as the prevention of cross-examination means that the trial is unfair. This is the right decision. It is the only sensible decision. Imagine you are incorrectly accused of a crime, and the majority of the weight of evidence against you comes from an anonymous witness. Shouldn't your lawyer be able to ask questions that would expose them as a fraud?

But the UK government wants to rush laws through making this kind of evidence acceptable.

Letting somebody get away with a crime is itself less of a crime than imprisoning an innocent person. It is time that people realised that the law is there to protect our freedoms, not make it easier for others to take them away.

Just In Case You Were Complacent

For those UK readers who think that the problem of creationism entering the education system as science is an American phenomenon there is bad news. Such teaching is going on daily in the UK too, mainly thanks to Tony Blair's great belief in 'faith schools'.

An Update / Carnival of The Godless

Well, it's still well under a month since I started this blog, and already the response is heartening. So far I have had visitors from 26 countries, mainly in Western Europe but also some slightly less unexpected corners of the world. In particular the response in the USA and at home in the UK has been very positive.

There are already a few people coming in from search engines, particularly Google. Technorati has been the main source of incoming links, closely followed by sites on the Atheist Blogroll.

Obviously I'd love you to link here, or to any posts that you find interesting. If you do so drop me an e-mail or a comment and I'll make the effort to have a look through your blog/site and make a few comments.

Also please feel free to make a few more comments, I know that this blog is still in its infancy but I do try and reply to all those where a reply is appropriate. Hopefully the resulting discussions will be of interest to somebody! It's worth noting that although I moderate comments I do this only to remove spam, I have no problem publishing comments which disagree with what I have to say. Open discussion is the way forward.

The final comment is that this blog will host the Carnival of The Godless on the 19th August this year which I am looking forward to already!

British Centre for Science Education

I saw on another blog (sorry I forgot which one) about this guy David Anderson who has created a blog solely as an attempt to counteract the British Centre for Science Education, whose aim is to prevent creationism being taught in UK schools.

I must admit prior ignorance of this group, but I have read around their website and I agree with their aims, and have since registered for membership, which is currently free. I would encourage you all to do the same here. Perhaps we can make something positive has come out of David's blog after all.