Author: Ophelia Benson

Oh honestly. Not good enough.

Ten years ago, the BBC was always telling us how bloody marvellous the euro was. Now – for reasons I can’t quite fathom – it’s assisted suicide.

Really? Can’t fathom? Well try harder.

It’s really not that difficult. Something is going to kill us – you, me, all of us. We don’t know what it will be. We do know it could be slow and horrible. We’re afraid of that. Some of us would like to know we (and others who want it) have the option of cutting it short; knowing that would relieve one of the fears.

Now can you fathom it? I’ll tell you what I can’t fathom: I can’t fathom why that’s so difficult to fathom. I also can’t fathom being flippant about it. This isn’t some joke or some bit of trivia; it’s something that threatens everyone.

When the Beeb is really keen on something, it enlists the support of a soft-Left celebrity to make its case – the most popular candidates being Stephen Fry and Eddie Izzard, neither of whom can resist hauling themselves on to a bien pensant hobby horse.

What is bien pensant about it? What a ridiculous, callous, frivolous thing to say. I don’t see anything remotely bien pensant about it. Assisted suicide, trendy? I don’t think so. That’s about as convincing as Terry Eagleton (of all people!) calling Anthony Grayling “identikit Islington man.”

Damian Thompson ought to try thinking a bit more bien, if you ask me.

Oh I love it when people with an agenda accuse other people of bias.

A BBC film on assisted suicide was “biased”, critics have said.

Care Not Killing campaigners said Choosing to Die, which shows a British man with motor neurone disease dying, was “pro-assisted suicide propaganda loosely dressed up as a documentary”.

And the ex-Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir Ali, said it “glorified
suicide”.

…

The Bishop of Exeter, the Right Reverend Michael Langrish, said he wanted to see “much more emphasis put on supporting people in living, than assisting them in dying”.

Oh well then – ! If Care Not Killing campaigners and a bishop say it’s propaganda, well, they certainly are unimpeachable authorities on how to be free of bias, right? As of course is the Christian Institute.

The BBC is facing a storm of controversy after it aired Sir Terry Pratchett’s “very unbalanced” documentary on assisted suicide last night.

The Corporation has received hundreds of complaints about the programme, Choosing to Die, which went out on BBC2 at 9pm.

And critics, including the Bishop of Exeter, spoke out against the programme amid an accusation that it was “one-sided”.

Said the multi-sided Christian institute.

Reviewing the programme in The Guardian newspaper, Sam Wollaston described the clinic, which is operated by Dignitas, as: “Not a lovely chalet in the mountains, with meadows and edelweiss and the sound of cowbells, as you might hope for; but a strange blue prefab on a Zurich industrial site.”

Oh good point. Just what ill disabled people need: a long expensive taxi ride up to a mountain chalet as opposed to a comparatively short affordable trip to an urban building. Plus of course that’s so obviously a telling example of bias and propaganda, the fact that the BBC didn’t pretend Dignitas was in a pretty meadow.

Remember: religion makes people nicer.

On treacherous building sites little boys were flogged if they slowed down,  carrying loads of bricks up the scaffolding, lime burns lacerating their legs,  hands blistered and cut. This was not Dickensian England; this was Australia and  it was happening until 1970.

…

In 1946, at the age of 10, Hennessey was sent from an orphanage in England to  the brutal Bindoon Boys Town in Western Australia….

”The brothers and sisters were all together,” he says. ”And then they  started grabbing the girls away from their brothers. I can still hear the  screams of these kids being separated. Some of them never saw their sisters  again. I still have nightmares.”

Life at Bindoon, run by the Catholic Church’s Christian Brothers, was a  catalogue of cruelty, where beatings and sexual assaults were daily events.

”Bindoon was nothing more than a paedophile ring,” Hennessey says. ”Most  of the brothers were into raping and molesting little boys, sometimes sharing  their favourites with each other.”

The boys were put to work building the series of grand buildings that Bindoon  became. ”It was slave labour,” says Hennessey. Many of them are now deaf or  partially deaf because they were constantly bashed around the head.

He recalls children resorting to stealing food from the pigs they tended –  because the pigs were better fed.  Brother Francis Keaney, the head of Bindoon,  would eat bacon and eggs in front of boys who were fed porridge mixed with bran  from the chicken feed. The boys would raid the  bins for his scraps.

And so on.

They’re still doing it…

The Independent’s first paragraph:

Britain’s largest mainstream Muslim organisation will today call for “robust action” to combat Islamophobic attacks amid fears of growing violence and under-reporting of hate crimes.

You already know what that organization is, right? And it is: it’s the MCB. But what is “mainstream” about the MCB? It is, notoriously, reactionary and male-dominated. More genuinely “mainstream” Muslims don’t consider it mainstream at all, and fume at the media habit of calling it mainstream and treating it as mainstream.

Taji Mustafa, spokesman for Hizb ut-Tahrir in Britain, said: “Xenophobic attacks on Muslims have increased under successive governments. In a manipulative alliance with some sections of the media, they have demonised Islam as part of their foreign policy propaganda.”

Ah well if someone from Hizb ut-Tahrir says so, it must be true.

It takes more than one person to argue with Michael Ruse. Jerry has, Russell has, but I still found new stuff that irritates me, so here it is.

…science tells us that Adam and Eve are fictions. That Saint Paul or Uncle Tom Cobley and all thought otherwise is irrelevant. They were wrong. This is not to say that they were stupid or careless. Two thousand years ago, for a Jew to believe in Adam and Eve was perfectly sensible. But time moves on and with it our understanding of the world around us, and old beliefs have to give way to new ones. Aristotle thought that some people were born to be slaves. He was wrong. St. Paul thought we are descended from Adam and Eve. He was wrong.

But wrong in different ways, for different reasons. Science tells us that Adam and Eve are fictions, but (Sam Harris notwithstanding) it doesn’t tell us that some people are not born to be slaves. On the contrary – science could well tell us that some people are born to be slaves, provided it started from some stupid (but not particularly unscientific) assumptions, such as that people with (or without) certain Xs are born to be slaves. Science could pick out which people have (or lack) the certain Xs, and the job would be done. Saying why that’s wrong is not the same kind of thing as demonstrating that Eve and Adam are fictions.

What should be the attitude of the Christian faced with clear evidence that some part of the Bible cannot be taken literally and that this must have consequences for hitherto-accepted theology? Clearly, some alternative theology must be sought. This is not giving up or mere ad hoc responding. The great British theologian John Henry Newman saw clearly that the essential truths of the Christian faith remain unchanged, but that, given new knowledge in each age, they need constant reinterpretation and updating.

An, naughty Michael Ruse – note that “saw.” Note that “saw clearly.” Ruse claims that Newman saw clearly something which is in fact contestable and contested; by wording it that way Ruse of course loads the dice. What, exactly, are “the essential truths” of the “Christian faith” and how on earth does Ruse know they remain unchanged? And if they remain unchanged, what does it mean to say they need constant reinterpretation and updating? How is that not just having it all ways, by merely saying so? The essential truth remains unchanged but it needs constant reinterpretation and updating but nevertheless it remains unchanged…apart from the constant reinterpretation and updating. A “truth” that is constantly reinterpreted and updated can’t be said to remain unchanged, can it.

Well he goes on to explain – but it’s still just saying; it’s nonsense.

God is creator, Jesus is his son who died on the cross for our sake, this act of sacrifice made possible our eternal salvation — these claims are unchanged. But what exactly this all might mean is another matter.

If what it all might mean is another matter, then the claims are not unchanged! You can’t do both, dammit – you can’t say they’re unchanged apart from being changed. Just keeping the husks of words but completely changing the meaning does not equal unchanged claims.

Oh it’s so tiresome all this special pleading.

 

I just accidentally learned, via a post of Eric’s, that George Pitcher last autumn got a job as public relations flack for the archbishop of Canterbury. I’m amazed. I’m shaken to my core. My Weltanschauung is all anyhow. I have to rethink everything I thought I knew.

One thing I thought I knew was that Rowan Williams is a scholarly, gentlemanly sort of fella, however mistaken about everything. But he can’t be, since he hired or consented to the hiring of a vulgar abusive hack like George Pitcher.

Remember him? Remember him in May of last year, when Evan Harris lost his seat?

A stranger to principle, Harris has coat-tailed some of the most vulnerable and weak people available to him to further his dogged, secularist campaign to have people of faith – any faith – swept from the public sphere…For a doctor, he supported the strange idea that terminally ill people should be helped to kill themselves…

Now he’s gone to spend more time with his NSS pamphlets and the House of Commons is better for his passing. His political demise will be mourned only by those with a strange fascination for death, those euthanasia enthusiasts whose idea of care for the elderly and infirm is a one-way ticket to Switzerland. But now Dr Death cannot bring a malign influence to bear on the legislature any longer. Bye bye, Evan.

That is the kind of writer and thinker that the archbishop is pleased to have handling public relations for him.