What are we talking about here?

A police trainer who was sacked for believing that officers should use psychics to solve crimes is going to court to prove he was the victim of religious discrimination.

Was he sacked – is he claiming he was sacked – just for believing that? Or was he sacked for practicing it? Surely that makes an important difference – yet, oddly, the piece nowhere makes it clear which possibility is at issue.

Alan Power, who has been a member of a Spiritualist church for 30 years, argues that his belief in the power of mediums should be placed on a par with more mainstream religious and philosophical convictions…At a tribunal in London, Mr Power

I’m reading Terry Eagleton’s Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. It’s a very slight book which one could read in an hour, but I’m reading it slowly because I’m taking a lot of notes, and also because it makes me sick, so I don’t like to read it for long at a stretch. I gave myself a break from it for a few days, and when I picked it up again after this break, I was struck all over again by its truly objectionable combination of rudeness and glibness and shallowness and pretension. I really hate that combination, and Terry Eagleton wears it as if it were a mink coat and he were a heedless aristocrat.… Read the rest

Richard Norman offers to take seriously the claims of Eagleton and Armstrong and other critics of The God Delusion in order to ‘try to do justice to the nuanced diversity of the views of the religious,’ agreeing at the outset that

Dawkins does over-simplify. Although he knows perfectly well that most Christians are not creationists, he sometimes writes as though they were, and implies that all religious belief is just obviously refuted by science and Darwin. He is inclined to treat all versions of religion as equally irrational.

He considers the relationship between religion and science first, pointing out that Dawkins is right that the claim that ‘God’ is a simpler answer to questions about why the universe exists and … Read the rest

What exactly are they talking about? What do they mean by ‘communities’? It does make a difference.

We are working to help people and local organisations create strong, attractive and economically thriving communities and neighbourhoods. Our aim is to ensure that they are given all the support they need to make the best of their communities and overcome their own difficulties. These are problems like community conflict, extremism, deprivation and disadvantage.

That sounds (mostly) benign and useful. In fact it sounds like what Barack Obama used to do – and in doing realized that he wanted to change more than just local ‘communities.’ People live in (literal) communities and neighbourhoods, and it is good to help those communities and neighbourhoods … Read the rest

Sometimes the level of disgustingness can still surprise and disconcert and sicken.

Faith groups are to be given a central role in shaping government policies, a senior minister has vowed. John Denham, the communities secretary, said the values of Christians, Muslims and other religions were essential in building a “progressive society”. He attacked secularists who have called for religion to be kept out of public life. Mr Denham revealed that a new panel of religious experts has been set up to advise the Government on making public policy decisions.

What is a ‘communities secretary’ and why does the UK government think it’s a good thing to have one? Why does New Labour have such a chronic frozen painful hard-on … Read the rest