cloudsoup

The actress and singer, Crystal Bernard, and her sister Robin, when kids, sang songs written by her evangelical minister father, Jerry Bernard to his congregations.

It seems her father was a pretty fundamentalist preacher of the Southern US Baptist-type but the songs he wrote, against evolution, against other faiths, sects and schisms, were really rather good, pretty funny, and well-performed.

From Ubu Web, here are The Monkey Song and The Ecumenical Movement – just click on the MP3 icon at the top right of the page.

I bought Sam Harris‘s book, ‘The End Of Faith‘ at Heathrow to annoy any fundamentalist religious terrorists I might have found myself sitting beside on the flight to the US. If the plane was going down, their last minutes would be spent enraged by the infidel, I thought.

It was a refreshing blast of a book. Dawkins, in his review, wrote ‘Even moderate religion is a menace, because it leads us to respect and “cherish the idea that certain fantastic propositions can be believed without evidence”‘.

Now Harris has brought out another book, ‘Letter to a Christian Nation‘, which promises more of the same but targetted more specifically at the US. Excellent, but I wonder if I’ll be able to read it in the UK now the religious incitement law’s here.

This latest Orwellian encroachment on freedom has just been applied in the manner its supporters claimed would never happen, by the police to threaten the Gay Police Association which claimed that a 74% increase in homophobic incidents was largely or solely motivated by religion.

Whether the figures are correct or not, a complaint from the Christian fruitcakes has resulted in police action and could end in a prosecution. As MediaWatchWatch says,
‘If this results in a prosecution, it will mean that it is illegal to suggest that religious belief can sometimes lead to violence.‘.

John Stuart Mill must be spinning like a top in his grave:

Mill argued that society may only legitimately regulate the conduct of individuals in order to prevent their inflicting harms on others. Crucially, he felt that offense did not constitute harm, and therefore he supported almost total freedom of speech.

John Stuart Mill,Wikiipedia

I believe in the fact of evolution. I even believe in it with passionate conviction. To some, this may superficially look like faith. But the evidence that makes me believe in evolution is not only overwhelmingly strong; it is freely available to anyone who takes the trouble to read up on it. Anyone can study the same evidence that I have and presumably come to the same conclusion. But if you have a belief that is based solely on faith, I can’t examine your reasons. You can retreat behind the private wall of faith where I can’t reach you

Richard Dawkins, Is Science a Religion?

Dawkins goes on to describe religious indoctrination of children a form of mental child abuse. As someone obliged by parents to attend church every Sunday and Sunday School too I wonder whether Dawkins isn’t being hyperbolic about this. After all, I ended up a healthily sceptical atheist, my doubts being partly provoked by the sexual shenanigans of the Rev (he ran off with a parishioner) and of a senior respected church elder who had a stash of the most explicit pornography imaginable in the days way back before the Web.

I coped with the sexual hypocrisy by assuming everyone was lying about everything for reasons I couldn’t quite fathom. I suppose now that they were partly fooling themselves, too, more for social reasons than for any supernatural revelation. I don’t think anyone at the Van Road United Reformed Church was doing a Julian of Norwich. The place was a club for people who preferred the easy comfort of small dishonesties to the difficulty of thinking.

Where I might have missed out is in what I wasn’t introduced to. Nobody bothered to tell me about the Enlightenment and Hume and the grand history of dissent, agnosticism and atheism in the UK and abroad. Nobody told me about Darwin.

Religion is the one field in our culture about which it is absolutely accepted, without question without even noticing how bizarre it is that parents have a total and absolute say in what their children are going to be, how their children are going to be raised, what opinions their children are going to have about the cosmos, about life, about existence. Do you see what I mean about mental child abuse?

Richard Dawkins, Is Science a Religion?

This from the Catholic Church:

Leading UK Catholics and members of Opus Dei have formed a group to respond to the negative impact the Da Vinci Code film is expected to bring.

The Da Vinci Code Response Group, which also includes a Benedictine abbot and two priests, has condemned Dan Brown’s book as “fiction trading as fact”.

BBC, Catholics form Da Vinci film team

Warning label on Bibles

Hardly believable from an organisation that deliberately promulgates what most of its priests and theologians know full well is a largely fictional account of the pre-literate religion of desert folk. But there’s more, according to the BBC’s story. The cult-like Catholic group, Opus Dei, has asked Sony Pictures to include a caption explaining the film is fiction.

• Hitchens on cartoons and the State Department
• Drinking from Home on police priorities
• Theo van Gogh, slaughtered, Ayaan Hirsi Ali under protection
• Hitoshi Igarashi, murdered, Ettore Capriolo, murdered.

Here’s one of my favourite Tom Lehrer songs, called The Vatican Rag.Mr Lehrer wouldn’t be with us now if it had been The Mecca Rag – he’d have been butchered by some fundamentalist fascist freak:

First you get down on your knees,
Fiddle with your rosaries,
Bow your head with great respect,
And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect!

Do whatever steps you want, if
You have cleared them with the Pontiff.
Everybody say his own
Kyrie eleison,
Doin' the Vatican Rag.

Get in line in that processional,
Step into that small confessional,
There, the guy who's got religion'll
Tell you if your sin's original.
If it is, try playin' it safer,
Drink the wine and chew the wafer,
Two, four, six, eight,
Time to transubstantiate!

So get down upon your knees,
Fiddle with your rosaries,
Bow your head with great respect,
And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect!

Make a cross on your abdomen,
When in Rome do like a Roman,
Ave Maria,
Gee it's good to see ya,
Gettin' ecstatic an'
Sorta dramatic an'
Doin' the Vatican Rag!

I cobble together a verse comedy about the customs of the harem, assuming that, as a Spanish writer, I can say what I like about Mohammed without drawing hostile fire. Next thing, some envoy from God knows where turns up and complains that in my play I have offended the Ottoman empire, Persia, a large slice of the Indian peninsula, the whole of Egypt, and the kingdoms of Barca, Tripoli, Tunisi, Algeria, and Morocco. And so my play sinks without trace, all to placate a bunch of Muslim princes, not one of whom, as far as I know, can read but who beat the living daylights out of us and say we are ‘Christian dogs.’ Since they can’t stop a man thinking, they take it out on his hide instead.

Beaumarchais’ Marriage of Figaro, 1784

Freaky young-earth creatonists AnswersInGenesis, organisers of the notorious meeting at Emmanuel College, Gateshead, pop up on my referrer list. Specifically:

11 0.66%: mail.answersingenesis.org

which means that someone at AiG is reading an email with a link to this website in it.

An indication, if it were needed, that the new law on religious hatred is a deliberate attempt to win back the Muslim vote:

The Muslim Council of Britain has been at the forefront of lobbying the Government on issues to help Muslims. Recently Iqbal Sacranie, the General Secretary of the Council, asked Tony Blair to declare that the Government would introduce a new law banning religious discrimination. Two weeks later, in the middle of his speech to the Labour Party Conference, Tony Blair promised that the next Labour Government would ban religious discrimination. It was a major victory for the Muslim community in Britain.

But this is not the first and only time that Labour Party has delivered for Muslims. When I was a Home Office Minister in 1997, the MCB lobbied me to introduce not only a new law which would increase sentences for racial violence and harassment but also to recognise the particular problems faced by Muslims. As a result we were able to amend the law to make religion a factor in any violence and harassment. Today, new Crime Bill, announced in the Queens Speech is coming before Parliament to toughen the laws on incitement to religious hatred. This has upset some M.P.`s such as Evan Harris MP, the Liberal Democrat spokesman, who has said he will oppose it because it is unnecessary!

Energy Minister Mike O’Brien

And as Islam Online says,

After the Muslim support for their traditional Labour party had halved and the free fall of the party’s ratings in the local and European Parliament elections, the government has come to realize the fact that the Muslim vote does really count and planned to win the hearts and minds of the Muslim citizens.

The Home Office has already unveiled plans to put forward a legislation criminalizing incitement of religious hatred.

Kow-towing to religious fanatics now appears to have resulted in militant Christians threatening people at the BBC over the showing of Jerry Springer – The Opera.

Cardinal Murphy O’Conner, as reported previously on cloudsoup, criticised the conflict in Iraq on grounds of cost. At the time we pointed out the huge misspend of money caused by the Catholic Church’s having to recompense the victims of its child-abusing priests.

Since Cardinal Murphy O’Conner’s plea to watch the pennies, the Diocese of Orange, in Los Angeles has announced it is to pay $100m (£53m) to the victims of sexual abuse by clergy members.

As the Cardinal is keen to give money to the impoverished, and as his church’s priests seem incapable of controlling their urges to abuse children, we wonder if the Catholic Church mightn’t arrange to sexually abuse only poor children to make sure the compensation paid at a later date serves a redistributive function.

That is also why the reaction of faith is or should be always one of passionate engagement with the lives that are left, a response that asks not for understanding but for ways of changing the situation

Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, on the Tsunami

Intriguingly, non-Christians are far more likely to give than Christians: one in three non-Christians donate money, as opposed to one in eight Christians.

Stephen Pollard, citing the British Social Attitudes Survey