Where next?

I had prepared a blog post on what next after today’s Scottish Independence Referendum, whichever way the vote goes. But Caroline Lucas has pretty much hit the nailed it at Left Foot Forward with her open letter to the three party leaders – I recommend reading it.

Whoever wins (I hope by a significant majority) there is some optimism to take away from the campaigns in the run up to the referendum. Not from the party leaders or the celebrity political names like Sheridan and Galloway, but from people on the street engaged with their politics, other people, and their own future. If you’ve visited Scotland in the last few months you can’t have missed the Yes and No posters on walls, in house windows, on fences in fields and by the road. People have been talking to each other. True, there has been some negativity from both sides and I have witnessed naked nationalism and outright dishonesty, but in the main people have been good natured, and most importantly, positive and with a real optimism for the future.

For too long optimism has been missing from political discourse, hidden behind cynicism and the personal ambitions of lobby fodder polticians. In the referendum battle we’ve seen people take politics back into their own hands, and they’ve made their way to the polling booths in unprecedented numbers. And the politicians are scared.

I hope this optimism and drive for self determination catches on, and heads south of the border. In a country dominated by political parties that put people before profit, we’ll need it.

Good luck Scotland.

Boat bones

Trow Rocks rescue

Long distance shot of a Seaking helicopter on a rescue at Trow Rocks, South Shields.

Morning sky

Newcastle Central Library

Shielded from truth

In the 1998 scifi action film Soldier, Kurt Russell plays Sgt Todd, a soldier who has been trained from birth to be a ruthless and efficient killing machine. To illustrate Todd’s complete absence of empathy, there’s a scene at the beginning of the film where he is in a battle in Moscow, walking through blasted ruins mowing down enemy Russian soldiers with his machine gun. A Russian soldier takes a civilian woman hostage, and holds her in front of him as a shield. The ruthless Sgt Todd shoots the civilian and the soldier without blinking. Todd’s complete dedication to the mission is chilling. We know that he is wrong; we know that he is not a moral person.

Watching Soldier on the television the other night it struck me that this is what a ‘human shield’ looks like. A non combatant intentionally placed in the line of fire to stop the opposing side firing on troops and military assets.  It’s a term we’ve been exposed to relentlessly in the past couple of weeks.

It’s been one of the criticisms levelled at Hamas – that they are using civilians as human shields. And this has been used extensively by apologists of the Israeli government to defend the killing of innocent civilians in Gaza.  Make a comment critical of Israel’s military actions and it won’t be long before a pro-Israel astro turfer rolls out the human shield defence.  The reasoning usually applied is one of the following:

– Hamas are using human shields, so Israel has no option but to kill those human shields in order to kill Hamas.

– Hamas are using human shields, so it’s inevitable that Israel will unintentionally kill those human shields whilst trying to kill Hamas.

Neither options can be considered moral. Both scenarios mean that civilians will die as a result of the Israeli government’s military actions, and that the Israeli government knows it.

There’s no doubt that Hamas is waging it’s war on Israel from the neighbourhoods of Gaza, and have been caught storing weaponry in empty schools.  But Gaza is a city of over two million, and it quickly becomes clear that Hamas’ war is being waged from inside a heavily populated area, not behind the people of Gaza.  To make it worse, the civilians of Gaza are pinned in place by Israel and Egypt with no place to run.  They are trapped.

And yet, Israel continues to launch high explosive ordinance at that small patch of land packed with humans.

This is no defence of Hamas or its allies.  I wouldn’t want anyone to live in a state run by religious extremists who ban freedom of speech, murder their political enemies and zealously execute sharia law with often deadly consequences.

The saying goes about the first victim of war being truth, and the Middle East is no different.  Using the human shield claim as absolution for killing the innocent is staggeringly dishonest and cowardly.

Face in the sky

A little bit of Pareidolia in some noctilucent clouds from earlier on in the week, taken from my bedroom window with a mobile phone.

Warning, cryptids on the road!

Some unusual creatures must pose a hazard on the roads on the Isle of Skye.

True faith

I’m not sure if the Shields Gazette’s Mike Hallowell is trying to prove his theological chops with his most recent piece, a rather feeble attack on people who dare to criticise religion and the actions of the religious.  Being a fresh convert to Islam, you would hope a new approach to religious apologetics.  Sadly not.

Atheists are religious

Let’s get one thing straight from the outset – despite what atheists tell you to the contrary, they are every bit as religious as we believers.

Hallowell doesn’t define what he means by religious, but by any sensible definition, atheism is the antithesis of religion, hence the noun: atheism.  Atheism has no holy leaders, no sacred texts, no bizarre rituals, and most importantly, no belief in a god or gods.  And that’s about as simple as atheism gets – an absence of belief in supernatural beings.  There are some atheists who have tried to take atheism further, to redefine it as a set of ethical behaviours borne out of a lack of religious belief, like in the case of the Atheism + concept.  But such attempts to change atheism into something more than an absence of belief have failed to gain traction.

I’m curious though – is Hallowell really suggesting that being religious is somehow a negative attribute?  Or is he saying that atheists can be just as good/bad as religious people in following their beliefs?

 

 

Atheists can’t prove there is no god

They cannot prove there is no God, and so a refusal to acknowledge the existence of one requires faith

This is one of the apologist’s favourite gambits.  The first response would be that the lack of evidence against a god does not count as evidence for a god.  The next one would be – which god?   As Hallowell should know the burden of proof for any claim falls firmly on the one making the claim – in this case burden falls upon the religious.  And the claims they do make don’t stand up to scrutiny.  If you took each religious text as the hypothesis for its respective religion – creation, talking donkeys, zombies, flying horses, ninja monkeys – and compared them to what we know through evidence or our understanding of the universe, you would quickly find that these hypotheses fail the test.  In other words, it’s nonsense.  There is no shame in refusing to acknowledge nonsense.

There are atheists who don’t even consider the existence of gods.  There is nothing to prove or disprove.  The Pirahã people of South America, whilst they believe that spirits inhabit their physical world, they have no gods. They can’t comprehend the concept – and they see no need for one, simply because it has no utility.  The thing that many religious people like Hallowell don’t get is that many atheists think in the same way – they see no need for a supernatural entity, or any evidence of one.  There is no faith at work here, only practical good sense.

Agnostics are more honest

Now agnosticism is something I can at least understand, for it doesn’t rule out the existence of God.

Every agnostic I know is functionally an atheist.  They don’t pray or go to church.  They don’t care about religion or live their lives according to religious dogma.  When agnostics say ‘I don’t know’, they are still saying they don’t believe, they’re just not ruling out the possibility there is an amorphous ‘something’ out there.  They have already ruled out the existence of every god they’ve been presented with so far, otherwise they would already be a believer.

Atheists are arrogant and nasty

Mr Wilson hit the nail bang on the head when he said that some atheists “display a form of arrogant, secular bigotry which sees itself as superior”.

Neither Hallowell or G Wilson have defined what ‘secular bigotry’ means.  The claim that the religious are somehow being ‘cowed’ by ‘secular bigotry’ in the UK doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.  Christianity is the state religion; churches, temples and mosques sit in our communities.  The religious run schools and sit in the house of Lords.  Prayers are spoken before every sitting of Parliament.  The BBC transmits religious radio and TV programs.  The reality is that people are free to believe what they want and say what they want about their religion.  Despite all these religious threads in our society, the UK is a secular state, and it’s the UK’s particular brand of secularism which gives people freedom of religion.

If you want to see religious people being cowed, they’re more often being cowed by other religious people or by cultish state doctrine.  In these often theocratic countries, being ‘cowed’ means imprisonment, torture or death.  In no secular state is apostasy a crime.  In the 20 countries where apostasy is a crime, sentences range from fines to imprisonment to flogging to death.  Every one of them is a majority Islamic nation.  It seems that in many countries, where religious disagreement occurs, harm isn’t far behind.  Here in the dystopian UK Hallowell and Wilson seem to think they live in, the worst that can happen to the religious speaking out is that they get mocked for saying silly things.

Atheists want to limit the free speech of the religious

You may also find that their concept of “free speech” really translates as “You can say anything you like, as long as it doesn’t contradict currently accepted scientific dogma”.

You’ll find that most atheists are happy with free speech.  However, it doesn’t mean they can’t call bullshit when some religious apologist says something silly, or for throwing around silly terms like ‘scientific dogma’.  Science isn’t a static dogma, it changes according to the evidence.  This is the strength of the scientific method.  Religion, however, remains dogmatic, and tries to hold its believers in an intellectual stasis, where everything must be measured in line with the interpretations of a holy book.

When the religious claim that their free speech is being limited, they really mean they can no longer make claims without someone disagreeing with them.  That’s because ideas don’t have rights.  In a civilised society every ideology – religious or political – must be open to free discussion without fear of reprisal.

On Friday, our television channels covered the commemoration of the sacrifice of young men against an ideology that sought to dominate the world.  Those commemoration ceremonies featured repeated religious rituals – on TV.  Remember seeing the TV reports of an army of secular bigots and aggressive atheists demanding that those religious people stop praying?  No?  Neither did I, because it didn’t happen.  Today, as I write this, a celebration of Pentecost is being transmitted on BBC 1.  There’s no atheists standing outside churches trying to “cop an attitude whenever someone mentions the G-word”.

Atheists hate religion

But why do some atheists truly hate religion and the religious?

This is an interesting take on the ‘atheists just hate god’ fallacy.  So let’s take a look.  Mass murder.  Women stoned to death.  Children mutilated.  The covering up of child rape.  Women dying when an abortion could have saved their life.  Young girls kidnapped for the needs of their fundamentalist captors.  Why would anyone not hate what religion and the religious can do to people?

The religious don’t really care what atheists say

The truth is that many believers just can’t be bothered to engage in duels with atheists who criticise them.

Those atheists who do criticise the religious tend to do so in response to what the religious have done or want to do.  However, the religious are not really known for keeping their religions to themselves: knocking on doors, putting leaflets through letterboxes, shouting through megaphones on high streets, online spamming, asking for money for missionary work and trying to change laws to suit their own murky moral framework.  Should the religious be surprised at being criticised for doing something worthy of criticism?

 

Hallowell’s article is a feeble attack on atheists, without an example to back up his claims.  If you look for an ‘aggressive atheist’ or ‘secular bigot’ you’re going to struggle to find one.  To find an aggressive religious adherent or a religious bigot, you need only to read the news.

No lead for Ukip in South Tyneside

Despite all of the optimism, Ukip failed to win a single ward in South Tyneside in yesterday’s local elections.  They did however raise their poll ratings, Labour stayed in poll position. Ukip even lost a seat (although you could argue they never gained it in the first place), after the fickle voters of Fellgate decided they weren’t happy with Councillor Steve Harrison abandoning his independence to pin his flag to the Ukip mast.

Publicly, local Ukip members will make a great deal about their gains, and rightfully they will have hope that this translates into seats next year, but privately they must have some serious concerns that they didn’t even win one seat from Labour, and lost one of their stars to Labour.

The Conservatives will also have some worried introspection, after Ukip have taken so many of their votes.

But Labour prevailed again in South Tyneside.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there were many people, who like me voted tactically yesterday. I haven’t voted Labour since 1997; before the illegal wars, PFI/PPI and the beginning of the privatisation of the NHS.

The ward that I live in here in South Shields, Harton, had a very limited field of candidates: Labour, Conservative or Ukip. Three parties wedded to the blind hand of the market and beholden to their millionaire donors. I would have preferred a left wing party to vote for, so the decision came down to not voting, or voting for the least worst. Not wanting a Ukip councillor, I opted for the latter, and Labour were definitely the least worst. Despite this, it was still a hard decision to make. Labour will crow about holding on to their lead in South Tyneside, but although a victory, it’s one where many of those who voted for them who are also deeply disappointed with the Tory-lite that Labour has become.

I don’t like voting in such a cynical manner, for a party I don’t believe in, but the ignorance, bigotry and negativity that Ukip stands for has no place in a fair and civilised society, and sometimes these difficult comprises have to be made.

Christian kick ass cop capers

This has got to be made into a film.  Or a TV series.  You can imagine the trailer.  A deep voice-over.  Based on a true story, a sassy female cop on the edge, a maverick who takes no shit and will bend the rules to catch her prey (or pray even).  In one scene, she’s told by her tough police captain “You’ve got 24 hail Marys to solve this case!”  And while she’s bringing down the bad guys, she’s raising a gifted but difficult child with a deadbeat dad.  Cut to a another scene with a criminal in handcuffs, declaring “How did you know it was me?”  The feisty female cop coolly replies…

“That’s intercession, motherfucker.”

Well, probably not the motherfucker bit.  But it is based on a true story.  In Spain, an icon of the Virgin Mary in Málaga was awarded the police gold medal of merit for being pretty awesome at fighting crime.  Scooby Doo must be pissed off.