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A Skeptical Blog has an interesting post regarding the American right’s hostility towards science, suggesting that support for the oxymoronic “Creation Science” isn’t just a sop to the religious right, but part of a wider agenda to suggest that science is subjective, and evidence for things like global warming will go away if people stop believing in them. (Link From Body and Soul).

Sometimes it seems to me that some people on the right really do think that reality is subjective, and scientific truths that have uncomfortable consequences for certain business interests and ideologies will conveniently go away as soon as people stop believing in them. I remember reading a free-marketist pamphlet a while ago apparently arguing for a ‘consensual reality’ when it came to the environment (either that, or the arguments weren’t very clear). Either such people have been playing too much Mage:The Ascension, or they’re economists, and think that just because an economy is a sort of consensual reality, the same applies to the physical universe.

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Evangelicals’ threat to new archbishop

Evangelical fundamentalists last night stepped up their campaign to oust Rowan Williams, the incoming Archbishop of Canterbury, before he even takes up his post, by threatening to take “direct action” against him. The council of the Church Society, the Church of England’s oldest evangelical body, joined a younger evangelical pressure group called Reform, which is also opposed to Dr Williams, in calling on him to recant his supposedly liberal views on sexuality or stand down.

Perhaps it’s time for ‘Mainstream’ Christians to take on the fundamentalists? For too long non-fundamentalists have been afraid to speak their mind, perhaps fearful of rocking the boat and seeming to promote disunity.

Surely those people who believe in crude literalist interpretations of scripture who believe that out-of-context bits of the legal code of a bronze-age tribe should still apply to the modern world need to be told that they’re just plain wrong.

If Christianity were to retreat into an unthinking blind fundamentalism, it’s doomed. Such attitudes are on the losing side of history, and have been for three hundred years.

Dodgeblogium discovers the awful truth about Tipper Gore’s dreaded PMRC! Who would have thought it!

Stuii was right when he wondered how long it would last. It appears that www.thinkofthechildren.co.uk has now been torched by an angry mob, just as Stuii predicted.

This Guardian Unlimited article bemoans the fact that whenever Hollywood adapts British novels to the screen, they always insist on Americanising things. The only British accents you hear always belong to the camp villain.

In Hollywood, English accents are out – to defeat aliens and save the world you need a good ol’ American drawl

Rumour has it that Steven Speilberg wanted to film Harry Potter and relocate Hogarts to the US. Sums it all up really.

Doesn’t bode well for the forthcoming film of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy – I fully expect Arthur Dent to become an American.

BBC NEWS | UK | Earthquake hits UK
OK, so it wasn’t a very big one. No reports of injuries, or any collapsed buildings. But I felt it in Manchester, 100 miles from the epicentre. At the time I thought I had dreamed it (it was the middle of the night).

I really have mixed feelings about the Countryside March currently clogging up London. I think hunting with dogs is a revolting, barbaric thing that belongs in the dustbin of history along with bear-baiting. However, is that a good enough reason for banning something? I can imagine a vindictive future Tory party led by someone scary like Ann Widdecombe banning things that heavy metal music or role-playing games, just because a few Daily Mail-reading fundamentalist twits dislike such things.

I believe issues like this must be decided at a local, not a national level. As an urban resident is it really any of my business whether people hunt with dogs in somewhere like Cumbria? As long as my taxes aren’t subsidising it, surely it’s the business the people in the local area to decide whether to allow hunting in their neck of the woods or not. Devolve this power the relevant local authorities, and let them decide!

On the other hand, this Countryside March claims to be about other rural issues, like lack of rural bus services and closure of local shops and post offices, and of course, the problems of the farming industry. Will Hutton, in this Guardian article a week ago, identifies some of the issues, and claims that the solutions to the real economic problems of rural Britain are the complete opposite of the rightwing agenda of the Countryside Alliance.

The Countryside Alliance should be pressing for Britain to join the euro, and for enforced and increased inheritance tax, an end to right-to-buy legislation, support for specialist farming banks and powerful co-operatives, the reregulation of rural transport and a drive to diversify the rural economy around a recast CAP. Instead, it offers reheated euro-scepticism, self-pity and a call to protect fox-hunting. Those who live and work in rural Britain deserve much, much better. They are lions lead by scarlet-jacketed and braying donkeys.

Bigwig of Silflay Hraka has suggested the that Europe is already well on its way to being conquered by Islam, using this quote

One of these concludes with a warning about the Muslim fundamentalist groups, which say, “They aim to make France an Islamic Republic by the year 2015,and Britain year 2025 through conversions, immigration and high Muslim birth rates”.

What he didn’t initially say was that his quote came from overtly racist site. When I pointed this out, Bigwig eventually managed to find the website of the Islamic extremist group the racist nutjob was referring to – Hizb ut Tahrir

Reading that site reminds me very much of the tracts spread by Trotskyite sects like the SWP and Militant Tendency two decades ago. Just as Britain has not been transformed into a Trotskyite worker’s paradise, nor was it ever likely to, there is no danger of Britain ever becoming an Islamic state on the model suggested by these people, because their numbers don’t add up.

Census estimates put the total number of British Muslims as numbering about one million, out of a population of sixty million. Despite the rantings of racist groups there is no longer a significant level of immigration; the British Muslim community largely originates from immigration from Pakistan in the 1970s. Neither is there any evidence of large-scale conversions to Islam.

Finally there is no evidence that organisations such as Hizb ut Tahrir have any large-scale support. The vast majority of Muslims just want to get on with their lives and be allowed to practice their religion in peace.

This isn’t to say groups like Hizb ut Tahrir are totally harmless; the rise of extremist groups that recruit from the disillusioned and alienated is something we in Britain need to be concerned about, just as we need to be concerned about the electoral success of the far right BNP in several northern towns. However, I would not even think of taking the word of a race-hate site as evidence of the threat they pose.

Twenty years ago many British cities saw riots, and there were serious social problems caused by alienated afro-carribean youths, children of 1950s immigration. A generation on a repeat of those riots would be unthinkable; Britain’s afro-carribean population is now largely assimilated into mainstream British society. I have every hope that the British Muslim population will be just as assimilated in a generation’s time.

I’m amused by today’s Church Times cartoon. Too much ‘Christian Humour’ is pathetically lame, perhaps because people are frightened to be irreverent. Happily, “St Gargoyles” in the Church Times doesn’t fall into that category.

September 11, 1973 is the date of the coup in Chile, overthrowing a democratically-elected government. In the reign of terror that followed, three thousand died, and many more were tortured.

While we must not forget the dead of 2001, we should also remember the dead of 1973, who did not die live on TV across the world, and died at the hand of a regime backed by the CIA and the Nixon goverment.

Today, there are still people on the right wing of the political spectrum that make excuses for these three thousand deaths. It’s not acceptable to make excuses for Osama Bin Laden, equally it should not be acceptable to make excuses for General Augusto Pinochet.