F Rosa Rubicondior: Secularism
Showing posts with label Secularism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Secularism. Show all posts

Monday 18 March 2024

Religion News - People Who Believe Absurdities Will Commit Atrocities!


Why Religions Seem to Involve Outlandish Beliefs | Psychology Today

It's axiomatic that people who can believe absurdities can be persuaded to commit atrocities.

One only need look at the history of just about every world religion to know that is especially true of people who hold to religious beliefs, yet most religious people will look at other religions and wonder how on Earth they can believe that nonsense, while having no understanding why others who look at their beliefs have the same thoughts.

How many devout Christians, for example, would find nothing strange in the belief that the sun was swallowed each evening by the goddess Isis, who then gave birth to it every morning or that ancient Celtic chiefs physically mated with the Earth goddess at Tara to unite the Irish people with the land they lived on?

Yet those same Christians have no difficulty believing that the blood sacrifice of an innocent person can atone for collective 'sins' inherited from ancient ancestors or that the dismembered bodies of ancient holy men can somehow persuade a god to change his perfect plans for their better one, or an omniscient, omnibenevolent god needs to be told about a wrong and why if should be righted, or a mind-reading god needs to be told their thoughts.

And a Moslem who believes the founder of their religion split the moon in half and flew to Heaven on a magic flying creature finds it incomprehensible that saying prayers to a painting of an ancient holy man or priest can change the direction of the universe, or that the prohibition on 'graven images' doesn't apply to gold-covered icons or depictions of a god nailed to a stick, worn by people who believe tiny images of a blood sacrifice or miniature instrument of torture worn around their neck protects them from evil spirits?

There are even people who believe the sun can be made to perform strange maneuvers in the sky while no-one else on Earth noticed it and without Earth itself needing to suddenly change its speed and direction of rotation or orbital path round the sun. Even the leaders of a major branch of Christianity, with a whole panel of expert scientific advisors, believe that really happened and continue to send people to Fatima where it is alleged to have happened - just one of the many equally implausible and evidence-free beliefs orthodox Catholics needs to hold.

Even coeliac suffering Catholics can believe a piece of wafer, when the right spells are cast over it, miraculously becomes the body of a dead god to be consumed in a cannibalistic ritual, while knowing they need to avoid eating it to avoid the consequences of gluten intolerance! That's a condition of belonging to a cultural group called 'Catholics'.

Saturday 16 March 2024

Why Religious People Find Atheism and Science Hard To Understand - Study Shows Atheists Are Generally More Intelligent Than Religious People


Why Are Religious People (Generally) Less Intelligent? | Psychology Today

One of the frustrating things about trying to debate with religious people in the social media, especially fundamentalists and creationists, is that they seem to have difficulty understanding simple logic such as the idea that the only reason for belief is evidence or the fact that lots of people believe something doesn't affect the truth of the belief.

There is also the impression (actually, it’s more than an impression, it seems to be a characteristic) that they think ignored evidence can be disregarded, so they will never read an article showing their beliefs to be wrong.

They generally seem more easily fooled by, for example, believing that an internet source supports them, when it is almost a rule that a link to a science paper provided by a fundamentalist will always say the opposite to what they claim it says, or that the ridiculous parody of science they've been fed by a creationist disinformation site such as AnswersInGenesis.com that no sane person would believe, is actually what real scientists believe. They have simply swallowed a lie and didn't see any need to check.

So, why do so many fundamentalists come across as limited in their ability to assimilate information and use it as the basis for opinions, other than an arrogant assumption that their beliefs must be true because they believe them, so no evidence is required and any contradictory evidence can be dismissed out of hand as 'wrong' or 'lies' or part of a giant conspiracy, and why do so many creationists came across as having the thinking ability of a toddler with a teleological view of the universe where even elementary particles are sentient and need to be told how to behave and which rules they must obey?

A meta-analysis of 63 earlier studies showed a statistically significant negative correlation between IQ and religiosity.

Saturday 10 February 2024

Trust in The Clergy Falls To An All-Time Low in USA


Ethics Ratings of Nearly All Professions Down in U.S.

According to the latest Gallup Poll, trust in the ethical standards of almost all identified professional groups in the USA has declined in the four years up to 2023 with trust in the clergy reaching an all-time low at 32 percent of those polled rating their trust in them as very high or high. The clergy now rank alongside chiropractors and psychiatrists in the public perception of their ethical trustworthiness.

All the 5 major professions in the USA fell steadily between 1976 when polling began but the profession which fell furthest and fastest was that of clergy. in 1977, 61 percent of adult Americans polled, gave their trust in clergy as very high or high; this has now fallen to 32 percent, a 29 percentage points decline to almost half what it was in 1977.

And this downward trend has accelerated since 2012, declining by an average of slightly over 1.8 percentage points per year, against an average of just over 0.38 percentage points between 1977 and 2012. This represents about a four-fold increase in the rate of decline which, projected forward, if this rate continues, no-one in America will rate the ethical trustworthiness of clergy as very high or high by mid-2032.

Wednesday 17 January 2024

Bigotry News - UK Christians May Retain The Right To Abuse Victims Of Their Choice


Women celebrating what they thought was a victory for their right to freedom from harassment and bigotry.
© Sister Support.
Ministers accused of watering down rules around abortion clinic buffer zones | Abortion | The Guardian

Last year, MPs in the House of Commons voted overwhelmingly to back an amendment to the Public Order Act which would have established 'safe zones' around clinics offering pregnancy termination services to women who need them.

This would have made it unlawful for anyone to harass or approach women entering the clinics in an attempt to prevent their access or to influence their choice by publicly shaming them.

Those routinely harassing women in this way are invariably Christians using various underhand tactics and disinformation and even threatening to photograph the women and post their picture on the social media. Women are routinely subjected to abuse and shouts of 'murderer' by sanctimonious bigots exercising what they claim is a God-given right to impose their views on others and deny others basic human rights.

The traditional passive-aggressive threat of 'praying' for the women and the foetus was used routinely with ostentations 'silent' prayer, clearly intended to shame and embarrass women. Only a Christian could weaponise 'prayer' while ignoring what Jesus allegedly told them about casting the first stone and not judging others.

Saturday 13 January 2024

Creationism in Crisis - Americans Are Now Abandoning Religion As Fast As Europeans Did A Generation Ago


Belief in Five Spiritual Entities Edges Down to New Lows
As the chart on the right shows, the decline in belief in God and Heaven has been the most dramatic, falling 16 percentage points in 22 years and the decline in belief in other magical entities like Angels and Satan has run in parallel, the differences being within the statistical error of the data.

What this reflects is the trend that has been apparent in American religious belief since about the mid 1960's where the younger generation have tended to be significantly less religious than their parents with belief in God and the importance of religion tending to increase in older generations. However, as people age, they tend to keep the religious beliefs they formed by the age of about 25-30. What these charts show then is the effect of the older generations dying and the younger generations moving up through the age groups, as the following chart shows:

Thursday 4 January 2024

Creationism in Crisis - Monogamy Predates Christianity By Millions of Years


Early Primates | | UZH
Religious fundamentalists like to assume they have ownership of the institution of marriage because the 'right' form of marriage was dictated by their imaginary god so we should all subscribe to their approved form of it. In many formerly majority Christian countries, the Christian-based marital laws are one of the few remaining vestiges of a time when Christianity imposed itself on everyone, believers, non-believers and non-Christians alike, arrogantly believing it had a divine right to rule.

But recent research has shown that a form of flexible monogamy, or more or less stable social parings of a female and a male is common if not the norm in the primate family. It was most likely incorporated into religions because some human tribes thought of monogamy as the 'right' form of sexual relationship, so any god whom the priesthood wanted to be taken seriously had to hand down 'morals' that the people thought were right and proper. After all, the only way to tell if a god is a good god or an evil god is to compare its morals and behaviour to that of an external standard of 'good', is it not?

If you think not, you have to believe that if your god had told people to hurt babies, rob banks and hit old ladies, those would now be considered moral acts and people who didn't do them would be regarded as immoral and deserving of punishment or other social sanctions. Christian apologist for faith-based genocide, William Lane Craig, has even declared that a seemingly immoral act such as infanticide, is morally right if you believe his (but only his) god commands it, and it would be immoral not to carry out such a divine command.

But William Lane Craig's repugnant idea of what constitutes morality is straying somewhat off the point, which is the 'right' form of marriage in human society, which William Lane Craig presumably believes is divinely commanded by his god and therefore mandatory for the rest of us.
But, absolute monogamy is not the universal norm in modern human sexual relationships, even in societies which only permit monogamous marriage, and probably never has been. Humans can best be described as mostly monogamous, most of the time, with 'infidelity' by both sexes being fairly common to the extent that some estimates put the number of people who have a different father to the one they think is theirs at about 25%. In some cultures, such as Islamic, bigamy is normal and, as evidenced by baptism records, pre-marital sex was commonplace in 19th Century England.

Sunday 29 October 2023

Superstition News - The USA is Not The Only Country Where a Large Number of People Believe in Magic and Would Welcome a Theocracy


Religion in South and Southeast Asia: Key facts | Pew Research Center

Although post-war Europe has seen major changes in religious affiliation and beliefs with Atheism and acceptance of the scientific view of human origins now the largest demographic by far in many countries, including the UK, the USA continues to be an outlier amongst Western industrial democracies in this regard, with a large number of people believing in magic and the special creation of humans as is, on an Earth that is just a few thousand years old.

Another feature of Western European post-war culture is the presumption that religious freedom comes not from a close association between church and state but by strict secularism, so that many countries that were formerly solidly Catholic or Protestant are increasingly secular. This contrast markedly with American evangelicals, who, whilst not being in the majority in what is also becoming an increasingly secular society, would like nothing more than a theocracy with Christianity even being required to qualify as a 'proper American' and the church being involved in education, the judiciary, the legislature and even the executive, in a Taliban-style theocracy.

As this Pew Research survey shows, American Evangelicals closely resemble South and Southeast Asian Buddhists and Muslims in this respect. The survey is the subject of a report by Jonathan Evans, Kelsey Jo Starr, Manolo Corichi and William Miner and a summary by Jonathan Evans.

It shows that in "three Buddhist-majority countries (Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Thailand) and two Muslim-majority countries (Malaysia and Indonesia), as well as the religiously diverse country of Singapore", religion is an important part of everyday life with both Buddhism and Islam having some similarities in terms of belief, personal and national identity and to what degree it should be involved in politics, laws and customs. In all these measures, religion, regardless of the sect, had a remarkable similarity to Evangelical Christianity in the USA, especially amongst the far-right Christian Nationalists.

Friday 27 October 2023

Catholic Sex Abuse News - Spanish Catholic Priests Sexually Abused Over 200,000 Children


Cardinal Isidro Gomá y Tomás, Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of Spain, when the Catholic Church was at the height of its power in Spain.
Spanish clergy sexually abused more than 200,000 children, inquiry estimates | Spain | The Guardian

The routine sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests is back in the news after an independent commission, led by Spain's national Ombudsman, former education minister, Ángel Gabilondo, has discovered that more than 200,000 minors have been sexually abused by Catholic priests since 1940.

This figure is an estimate based on extrapolating the figure of 0.8% of 8,000 Spanish adults in a survey who reported being sexually abused by Catholic priests before the age of 18 - a figure which rose to 1.13% (360,000 of Spain's 32 million adult population) if lay members of the church were included. Lay members of the church perform some of the duties of priests but are not ordained or under holy orders. As such, they come under the authority and control of senior church figured, usually the bishops, archbishops and cardinals in charge of diocese.

For most of the period, the Spanish Catholic Church was a privileged and protected institution that considered itself largely above the law - a position that derived from its active support and cooperation with General Frano's Fascist regime. During this period, the Catholic Church was given control of most of the influential and welfare aspects of Spanish life, including education, health and institutions such as orphanages, mother and baby homes and homes for single mothers, many of whom were themselves victims of sexual abuse.

Sunday 23 July 2023

Lesson from France - The Bloody Extermination of the Cathars at Béziers - "Kill them all for the Lord knoweth them that are His!"


Kill them all for the Lord knoweth them that are His!

Abbot Arnaud Amalric of Citeaux
Papal legate in charge of the Cathar genocide.
Citing 2 Timothy 2:19
Burning the Cathars at Béziers
Another reminder of the brutal, blood-soaked history of Christianity is to be found in the history of the French town of Béziers on the banks of the River Orb, in the Languedoc region, southeast of Montpellier, on the edge of the Camargue.

It has been, in turn, along with much of the area south of Toulouse, under the control of Greeks, Romans, Visigoths, Moorish Moslems from Andalucia, Catholic Spain and latterly, Catholic France. Until recent times, the local language was a dialect of French, Occitan, which has close links with Catalan. This gave it a sense of a separate identity from that of France - something that concerned King Philip II, keen to exert the same control over the southern provinces as he had over the North.

Béziers is now a peaceful, quite little market town and cultural centre but it was not always so. It was, until 1209, a stronghold of the Cathars, a religious sect which rejected Roman Catholicism and the authority of the Pope, which was brutally suppressed in the 'Albigensian Crusade' on the orders of Pope Innocent III in alliance with King Philip II of France.
For more information on the Albigensian Crusade and Pope Innocent III's and King Philip II of France's reasons for launching it, see:
  1. Lesson from France - Massacre of the Cathars of Carcassonne, or How Christians Settled Theological Differences
  2. Feel That Christian Love!
  3. Brotherly Love - How Christians Settle Disputes
Fresh from their success in laying siege to and then massacring the inhabitants of the Carcassonne, the crusaders moved on to other towns in the area, including Béziers.

Saturday 22 July 2023

Lesson from France - Massacre of the Cathars of Carcassonne, or How Christians Settled Theological Differences

Slideshow code developed in collaboration with ChatGPT3 at https://chat.openai.com/

Street below the Cité De Carcassonne with the Citadel on the Hill
We've just spent a day in Carcassonne, in southern France, just north of the Spanish border. It's a place every Christian should visit as a reminder of the blood-soaked history of their religion because Carcassonne was the site of one of the most brutal periods of Catholic history until the conquest of the Americas, the Albigensian Crusade.

The Albigensian crusade was conducted on the orders of Pope Innocent III, surely one of the most misnamed Popes in history; a crusade with the objective of nothing less than a total genocide of the Cathars and their religion.

The technique put into practice many of the methods used to terrorize populations and force them into submission that had been developed in the Crusades against the Moslems of the Eastern Mediterranean, where the method was to promise land to the barons and noblemen who led the armies, and the spoils of looting and pillage to the mobs of mercenaries that comprised to soldiery. There were no provisions for feeding and supplying the rag-taggle mobs as they raged through the countryside, so they had to take wheat they needed from the local populations. Towns and villages were ransacked, and the inhabitants slaughtered as a matter of routine.


And bloodletting was encouraged and glorified, to the extent that one observer recorded enthusiastically how the streets of Jerusalem were ankle-deep in blood when the Christian mob over-ran it.
The origins of Catharism are somewhat obscure, as it contained several different ideas fused into a loose system of beliefs with no central authority, so it tended to vary in different communities. A central idea was the essentially Gnostic belief in two gods - a good god of the spiritual domain and an evil god (Satan) who created the physical world and trapped angels inside human bodies. The creator (evil) god was the god of the Old Testament and the good god was the god of the New Testament, who Jesus was sent to tell us about. Escape from the physical world was through death and a special form of baptism to enable reunion with the god of the spiritual realm.

Like Catholicism does today, Catharism was obsessed with sex and saw sexual intercourse as sinful unless performed in the prescribed manner and pre-blessed by a priest in a special ceremony.

A consequence of their belief that the physical world was the domain of Satan and created by him to keep people away from God, was that everything to do with sexual intercourse was to be avoided because it produces more physical reality and more angels trapped in human bodies, so they were Pescatarians, believing that meat, cheese, milk and eggs were the result of sexual intercourse, but fish spontaneously generated and thus were safe to eat. The general disapproval of sexual intercourse caused some obvious problems for some Cathar communities, but others had found a way round it in a legend that the origins of the battle between good and evil in Heaven was because Satan had seduced one of God's wives (he has two, apparently), or maybe it was God who seduced one of Satan's two wives. This was sufficient evidence that God has sexual intercourse, so doesn't prohibit it.

Wednesday 12 July 2023

Historical Christian Abuse - New Museum to Scotland's Witch Hysteria


New museum remembers Scotland's dark era of witch hysteria

News that there is now a museum to the Scottish witch hysteria, prompted me to do a little bit of research into witchcraft and societies changed attitude toward the idea of witches casting evil spells and suspending the laws of nature with their thoughts.

Our modern-day attitude toward the whole idea of witches and witchcraft, compared to what it was when the atrocities of witch-finding and witch burning were being committed, mostly but not exclusively, by the Catholic Church at the behest of the Pope, shows how our morals are evolving and consigning religious 'morals' to the dustbin of history where they belong.

On of the main driving forces behind witch hysteria in Europe was a book, "Malleus Maleficarum" (Hammer of Witches) written by a sex-obsessed and misogynistic German Catholic clergyman Heinrich Kramer (under his Latinized name Henricus Institor). This classified witchcraft as heresy and thus punishable by burning alive, and recommended torture as the best way to discover the truth. Kramer's hatred for women whom he blamed for tempting him to 'sin', could scarcely be disguised, and on that faith-based misogyny, the witch burnings were based.

Although it was rejected by the Catholic Church at the time, "Malleus Maleficarum" was later revived by insecure royal courts during the renaissance for the same reason witch hysteria has been promoted since - to unite a frightened population behind a 'war' against an internal threat. The same way America's Republicans are waging a 'culture war' against the 'evil of liberalism' today.

Protestant Christianity also did its share of the persecution and murder of (mostly) unmarried or widowed women, of course, as the Pendle witch trials in England, the Salam witch trial in the Puritanical Massachusetts Bay Colony in Colonial America and the witch trials in Presbyterian Scotland attest.

The change in attitude towards the idea of witchcraft between then and now illustrates how societies do not get their morals from religion but religions get their morals, such as they are, from society. No organized church ever spoke out against the witch trials and demanded they cease or preached that they were immoral. But the churches, inspired by the Bible (Exodus 22:18) were very much the instigators of the atrocities, as they still are in some parts of Africa, where children are regularly targeted by preachers and accused of witchcraft in order to spread fear and distrust amongst their followers to keep them dependent on the church for 'protection against evil'.

What brought about the changes was an injection of a large dose of enlightened Humanism into western culture, with its sense of fairness, justice and evidence-based decision-making in place of faith-based superstition and reactionary dogma.

Monday 22 May 2023

Religion News - Californian Christians Demand the Right to Spread Hate and Disinformation

Religion News

Californian Christians Demand the Right to Spread Hate and Misinformation
Pro-Trump Christian extremists join the failed Coup on Jan 6, 2021

Christian Supporters of Donald Trump pray outside the U.S. Capitol January 06, 2021 in Washington, DC.

Win McNamee/Getty Images
Religious broadcasters seek to reverse California law aimed at quelling online hate speech

In a tacit acknowledgement that religions promulgate hate and division, and spread disinformation, The National Religious Broadcasters (NRB), an association of Christian media outlets, is joining a coalition opposing a Californian law that would require social media operators such as Facebook and Twitter to publish their policies for removing hate speech from their platforms.

In effect, NRB's president and chief executive officer, Troy Miller, is campaigning for the right of Christians to retain the special privileges of spreading hate and misinformation with impunity when he declared in a statement:

In an environment where much religious viewpoint expression is considered ‘controversial’ speech, NRB is acting to stop the weaponization of new laws against Christian communicators.

Monday 10 April 2023

Fake News - Pope Francis Can Declare the Truth- But God Needs to be Kept Informed

Fake News

Pope Francis Can Declare the Truth!
But God Needs to be Kept Informed
Fake News

Pope Francis Can Declare the Truth!
But God Needs to be Kept Informed
Fake News

Pope Francis Can Declare the Truth!
But God Needs to be Kept Informed
Fake News

Pope Francis Can Declare the Truth!
But God Needs to be Kept Informed

Francis focuses Easter message on hope, with prayers for an end to global conflicts

In his traditional Easter address 'Urbi et Orbi' ([to] the City and the world), Pope Francis announced that it was a solid fact that Jesus has risen, leaving historians bemused and wishing they too had the powers to declare truth by fiat. It would save an awful lot of time and money.

Scientists, of course, have long been envious of the magical power of religious clerics to simply declare facts to be true, even mutually contradictory ones and ones proven to be false. No need for all that experimentation and analysis; simply give it some thought, decide what would be convenient if it were true, and declare it to be so! Voilà! (Or should that be, Shazam?)

The Pope has this magical power, apparently, because an omniscient God speaks directly to him and informs him of the inerrant truth - rather like a mega-rich televangelist in that respect. All Pope Francis must do is announce it, and, at least as far as the Catholic Church and its followers are concerned, it is so.

However, he then went on to throw that whole 'fount of divine wisdom' thing into confusion by calling on the world to pray for peace between Russia and Ukraine. (There is nothing like an empty gesture in times of trouble, and it's a heck of a lot cheaper than sending aid.)

But hold on!

Sunday 9 April 2023

Crucifiction News - What Took Christians So Long to Depict The Crucifixion?

Crucifiction News

What Took Christians So Long to Depict The Crucifixion?
The Crucifixion by Andrea Mantegna, painted between 457 and 1459
The central panel of an altarpiece for church of San Zeno, Verona, Italy

The Louvre, Paris

The Crucifixion by Giotto
The Crucifixion by Giotto di Bondone (c 1303-1305)
Arena Chapel, Padua, Italy
The crucifixion gap: why it took hundreds of years for art to depict Jesus dying on the cross

As it is Easter, when Christians traditionally celebrate the repugnant notion of vicarious redemption through the blood sacrifice of a supposedly innocent person, I thought it would be good to examine the whole notion of the crucifixion of the legendary founder of the Christian religion, Jesus.

What I'm not going to do is point out the glaring and irreconcilable inconsistences in the accounts of the crucifixion and the alleged resurrection, which betray the fact that any pretense to be eye-witness accounts are just that - pretense.

If you want more information on that you're more than welcome to try the Easter Challenge to see if you can resolve the accounts into a coherent narrative incorporating all the alleged events.
The origins of Easter have nothing to do with the alleged crucifixion of course, being based, at least in part on the Roman festival of Hilaria:
For example, the timing of Easter is determined by the first full moon after the vernal equinox, which was also an important time in the Roman calendar. The Roman festival of Hilaria, which was held in honor of the goddess Cybele, was celebrated around the same time as the vernal equinox and involved parades, feasting, and gift-giving.

Reference:
  • "The Origins of Easter" by Mark Cartwright, Ancient History Encyclopedia: https://www.ancient.eu/article/1294/the-origins-of-easter/
  • "Easter" by Christine M. Tomassini, Encyclopædia Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Easter-holiday
  • "The Pagan Roots of Easter" by Jennifer Billock, History: https://www.history.com/topics/holidays/history-of-easter-origins-of-easter-traditions
ChatGPT. (2023, April 9). What are the Roman origins of Easter?
Retrieved from https://chat.openai.com/chat
The name 'Easter' comes from the Old English 'Ēastre', the name of an Anglo-Saxon festival celebrating the spring equinox which was used by the Christian Church as the arbitrary date of the alleged crucifixion of Jesus, which has as much basis in fact as the supposed date of his birth, i.e., none at all.

Perhaps the first thing to point out about the story is its unlikelihood.

Thursday 30 March 2023

Hypocrisy News - Pope Turns to Medical Science to Delay His Meeting with God

Hypocrisy News

Pope Turns to Medical Science to Delay His Meeting with God

Pope Francis
Holy hypocrite

Pope Francis in hospital with respiratory infection - BBC News

If anyone should be looking forward to the next life where he will spend eternity with God, according to the teachings of the church he heads, it's Pope Francis.

And yet we see him tonight in Hospital desperately trying to put off that day as long as possible. Like so many evangelicals preachers who told us we could look forward to a blissful after-life if only we obeyed all the rules, paid the tythes and did what they told us, Pope Francis is in hospital in Rome where medical science will be used to delay his meeting with God as long as possible.

Prayer having failed to cure his chest infection, or at least been recognised as ineffective, the pontiff has turned to science for help.

Having supposedly been chosen personally by God, who inspired the cardinals in conclave to vote for him, to be his personal representative and mouthpiece on Earth, like all his predecessors, Pope Francis should be confident of his place in Heaven.

Unless he knows something we don't know, of course.

Sunday 5 February 2023

Secular News - UK Now a Majority Non-Christian Country

Secular News

UK Now a Majority Non-Christian Country

Religion, England and Wales - Office for National Statistics

For the first time in a census of England and Wales, less than half of the population (46.2%, 27.5 million people) described themselves as “Christian”, a 13.1 percentage point decrease from 59.3% (33.3 million) in 2011; despite this decrease, “Christian” remained the most common response to the religion question.

Pie chart of major religions UK 2021
The main England & Wales religious demographics
Source: ONS
Figures released recently by the UK Office of National Statistics (ONS) show that in the 2021 census, in answer to a voluntary question, less than half (46.2%) of the 56.0 million people who answered (94%) self-identified as 'Christian'. This represents a 13.1 percentage point decrease from the figure for 2011 for the same voluntary question.

The second most common answer was 'no religion', up by 12 percentage points from 25.2% (2011) to 37.2%.

Religious Abuse - How Religion Deprives Children of Their Human Rights in Northern Ireland

Religious Abuse

How Religion Deprives Children of Their Human Rights
in Northern Ireland

Political map of Northern Ireland
Political divide in Northern Ireland
Reports: Rights of children in NI undermined by religion - National Secular Society

Reports recently submitted to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) by the Northern Ireland based child rights advocacy group, The Children's Law Center (CLC) demonstrate how religion continues to poisoning community relations, maintain divisions and hostility and deprive people of basic human rights, in Northern Ireland.

Despite years of progress following the end of the 'troubles' with the 'Good Friday' Belfast Agreement and the establishment of a power-sharing executive to administer devolved political power, the major source of intercommunal tension continues to be religion. The single most important barrier to the removal of religion as a source of hostility is the de facto segregation of primary and secondary education because of the insistence by the main Christian churches that they are not only influential in, but have control of education.

Despite a poll in 2012 which showed that 71% of the people of Northern Ireland believe an integrated education system should be the "primary model for the education system" and a 2016 UNCRC recommendation that Northern Ireland "actively promote a fully integrated education system" to facilitate "social integration, 93% of children in the province still attend faith schools while the few fully integrated schools can't meet the demand. In effect, parents have no choice but to send their children to be indoctrinated into one or other of two mutually hostile camps.


In 2016, the UNCRC also recommended ending the legally mandated collective worship in Northern Ireland schools where, unlike in England and Wales, even children over the age of 16 have no right to withdraw themselves from collective worship. Last year the High Court in Northern Ireland agreed that this situation is incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. Although parents can withdraw their children from collective worship, the process is often difficult, and children rarely receive an alternative period of equal educational value. Children are also required to reveal details of their beliefs, in violation of their right to privacy, and often face stigmatisation and prejudice.

As part of their religious education syllabus, faith schools are permitted to include their religion's orthodox teaching on relationships and sex education, leaving LGBTQ+ students feeling that they are the victims of homophobic bullying and demonisation, again in violation of their basic human rights.

There is no requirement for Northern Ireland's schools to teach evolution in science class and, unlike in England, where state-funded schools are forbidden from teaching scientifically discredited superstitions like creationism and intelligent design as science, no such bar exists in Northern Ireland where creationism in its various forms can be presented to children as a valid alternative to the scientific view, and the Christian Bible can be taught as real science and history.

Indeed, the state is complicit in misleading children and depriving them of a sound, evidence-based education, or an objective view of religions, because schools are required to teach RE "based on the holy scriptures", with the syllabus designed by the "four main Christian churches", without non-religious, or non-Christian input. Religions besides Christianity are described as "other religions", illustrating Christianity's privileged position. There is no provision to objectively evaluate the claims of the various religions or make an meaningful comparison between them and the non-religious view of the world.

Despite the diminishing role and influence of religion in both the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom, religion continues to hold sway in Northern Ireland, and in doing so, continues to foment and encourage intercommunal tension and strife while pretending to be peacemakers. Clearly, the interests of the priests and the churches is paramount and the interests of the people comes way down the list of priorities.

Saturday 24 December 2022

Amazing Science - James Webb Space Telescope Images

10 times this year the Webb telescope blew us away with new images of our stunning universe
James Webb Space Telescope
The James Webb Space Telescope
The more we look at the Universe and the more detail we see, the more majestic it becomes. In the words of the late, great carl Sagan:

How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, "This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?” Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.

Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
And another quote from Carl Sagan, referring to the famous photo of Earth seen as a tiny pale blue dot from beyond Pluto, because one is never enough:

Ann Druyan suggests an experiment: Look back again at the pale blue dot of the preceding chapter. Take a good long look at it. Stare at the dot for any length of time and then try to convince yourself that God created the whole Universe for one of the 10 million or so species of life that inhabit that speck of dust. Now take it a step further: Imagine that everything was made just for a single shade of that species, or gender, or ethnic or religious subdivision. If this doesn’t strike you as unlikely, pick another dot. Imagine it to be inhabited by a different form of intelligent life. They, too, cherish the notion of a God who has created everything for their benefit. How seriously do you take their claim?

Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space.
What would Carl Sagan have made of the images now coming from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)? The final one in the following article is of a segment of sky a fraction the size of a full moon. Tens of thousands of points of light in it each represent a single galaxy. Each of those will contain upwards of half a trillion stars, around each of which there is a good chance of a planetary system and possibly an Earth-like planet orbiting.

Are we so arrogant as to assume this was all made just for us and that a mind-reading creator god scrutinises this one small pixel, watching to see if anyone touches their genitalia, loves the wrong person, works on a Sunday, gets pleasure from sex or has the temerity to question what the priests tell us and to think for ourselves?

The article is by Colin Jacobs, Postdoctoral Researcher in Astrophysics, and Karl Glazebrook, ARC Laureate Fellow & Distinguished Professor, Centre for Astrophysics & Supercomputing, both of Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia, lookt at how the JWST images have blown us away over the past year, revealing a Universe never before seen in this stunning detail. It is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original can be seen here.

Tuesday 6 December 2022

Human Rights News - Women Fighting Back Against the Chritian Fundies Who Took a Basic Human Right Away

Pro Roe protestors outside the Supreme Court Building
SCOTUS overturned Roe v Wade, despite strong popular support for retaining it.
Pro-choice crowdfunding has surged in the U.S. — but donating that way has risks

America women, who had the basic human right to bodily autonomy taken away from them by Christian extremists who now dominate SCOTUS, are fighting back through crowdfunding.

They need to do this to raise money for travel out of a Repugnican-run state that doesn't respect their basic human rights, to a Democrat-run state where pregnancy termination services are still legal and a woman’s right to choose is recognised and valued over a Christian fundamentalist's assumed right to control others.
However, there are risks, not the least of which are retaliatory measures by extremists seeking to constrain even the right to travel in order to restrict a woman's right to choose, and pressure on social media platforms to deny women the ability to crowdfund their freedom-seeking trips. In an ominous foreshadowing of what a fundamentalist theocracy would be like, not content with forcing their religion on the people in the states they run, extremists also seek to impose it on people who have rejected them at the ballot box.

In the following article reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license, Professor Jeremy Snyder, Health Sciences, Simon Fraser University, Canada, examines the sharp increase in crowd-sourced funding by women seeking abortion services outside their home states. The article is reformatted for stylistic consistence. The original may be read here:

Monday 5 December 2022

Trumpanzee Cult News - Trump or Desantis? The Nutjobs May Decide It.

Evangelical Christians are crucial voters in Republican primaries. Would they support DeSantis or Trump?
The American Christian far right now has two dogs in the fight for the position of Repugnican candidate in 2024 - the odious, epitome of a sore loser, former president, Donald Trump and the evangelical white supremacist, governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, who emerged the stronger of the two in the mid-term disaster for Trumpanzee Repugnicans, where candidates who publicly bought into Trump's Big Lie of a stolen election, fared badly.

But is there much to choose between them? To someone like me from outside the USA, there doesn't appear to be a fag-paper's difference between Trump and DeSantis. They both appeal to the hate-filled, neo-fascist, human rights denying, white Christian evangelicals and misogynistic pro-life hypocrites who blame God and the Bible, and thank Trump and his stooges in SCOTUS, for their legalised denial of a woman's right to bodily autonomy.

What will come next? A ban on contraception? Legalised persecution of anyone who isn't heterosexual? Prohibitions on voting for anyone who isn't a white evangelical Christian? The abolition of democracy itself?

Seems a bit exaggerated? All of these have been advocated by the Christian far right at various time very recently and many of them see it as the entire reason for the 'culture war'!

Dominating the judiciary isn't enough for these privileged extremist who will only settle for a Taliban-style self-selecting theocracy which dominates both the Executive and the Legislature, which will be mere rubber stamps for the dictates of the self-appointed evangelical cult leaders. At least one popular televangelist with a huge following has already claimed to a cheering audience that God told him the government should be accountable to him, not the people.

How these extremists, who still form a significant block of American voters, despite the growing rejection of organised religions in the USA, will divide between the two candidates, then unite behind the winner, is still an open question, as is the question of how far their repugnant extremism will push people into the Democrat camp.

One frightening aspect of Christian fundamentalism the USA, is that many of them, the so-called dispensationalists, saw the relocation of the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem by Trump as the first move in setting the precondition for an apocalyptic war, and believe Donald Trump will complete that process. In that war they believe they alone will be saved and 'raptured' to a place of safety until it is safe to return to Earth where they will have everything for themselves and all those who disagreed with them will be dead - the greatest thing they can imagine!

If these self-possessed, entitled nutters gain the political powers they crave, they will have control of the biggest nuclear arsenal on the planet, with enough warheads to destroy all life several time over, all under the command of a narcissistic psychopath with an acute personality disorder, the self-control of a toddler and his own private nuclear bunker.

The stakes in 2024 really are that high!
In the following article reprinted from The Conversation, Professor David Smith, Associate Professor in American Politics and Foreign Policy, US Studies Centre, University of Sydney, gives his assessment of the prospects, and to what extent the unpopular (even amongst Repugnicans) state bans on abortion will affect the outcome of November 2024.

The article, which can be read here, has been reformatted fos stylistic consistency.
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