"Mark Damazer is God" - BBC Presenter

On the BBC's iPM, journalist Eddy Mayer referred to BBC Radio 4 Controller:

"Mark Damazer or God as we call him."

It isn't clear at this stage if Mr Mayer will be struck by lightning or just a reprimand for this blasphemy. He was being flippant (at least I HOPE he was) but I would be surprised if some rent-a-quote like, oh, S. "Burdshite" Green didn't have something to say.

On the same slot, Director of Christian Think-tank, Ecclesia Johnathon Bartlay, called the automatic inclusion of Bishops in the upper house, "absurd". Further noting how he had been quietly removed from the panel of "Thought For The Day" when he argued that non-religious speakers should be allowed a voice.

Presumably this is why Mayer referred to Damazer as God and not just the "baldy bastard from upstairs."

Damazer eloquently spews vitriol on the Today programme's audience on the iPM blog, where he writes:

"I regard this as a genuinely difficult question. There may be a case for widening the pool of contributors on Thought for The Day by having someone with an avowedly non-religious perspective. However on balance the BBC's position is that it is reasonable to sustain the slot with believers. Let me now set out the reasoning.

Thought for the Day is a unique slot in which speakers from a wide range of religious faiths reflect on an issue of the day from their faith perspective. In the midst of the three hour Today programme devoted to overwhelmingly secular concerns - national and international news and features, searching interviews etc - the slot offers a brief, uninterrupted interlude of spiritual reflection. We believe that broadening the brief would detract from the distinctiveness of the slot.

Within Thought for the Day a careful balance is maintained of voices from different Christian denominations and other religions with significant membership in the UK. We are broadcasting to the general Radio 4 audience which regularly engages with the comments and ideas expressed by our contributors from the world's major faiths - whether they are believers or not."

Obviously, he's talking shit as anyone of an atheist persuasion would be able to tell you if they could sit through this five minute interlude, which is effectively a short sermon, every weekday for a couple of weeks.

I have - and I can't bear the Archers. ("Oooooo Arrrrr. Look at the udders on that, baby!")

What Damazar refers to as "secular concerns" is, in fact, the real world. The tangible. But let's not forget, as he seems to have, that many of the wars - and certainly the bloodiest conflicts that are happening right now are - you guessed it - religious in nature. Jews and Muslims are fighting in Gaza and US Christians sending forced to pound Muslims in Afghanistan.

As a second point, and this will form part of my own argument to BBC management, why do we need "a brief, uninterrupted interlude of spiritual reflection" anyway?

If Mr Damazar is, as I suspect, a bible following Christian that is his own concern and he has no respect for the wishes of the largely secular R4 audience by continuing to bang us over the head with introspective, Abrahamic naval gazing.

TTFD is there to please a small minority of people who cling fearfully onto the notion that there is an afterlife and it'll all be better rather than having the guts to face what the future brings or the courage to change it.

Today would be better off without it.

Edinburgh Professor Believes In Teaching Creationism

According to a recent Guardian poll a quarter of UK teachers believe that creationism is should be taught. Says the paper:

The Ipsos/Mori poll of 923 primary and secondary teachers found that 29% of science specialists agreed with the statement: "Alongside the theory of evolution and the Big Bang theory, creationism should be TAUGHT in science lessons.

Anyone with a scientific mind should be able to dismiss creationism and intelligent design as dumb without much difficulty, but demonstrating how far the reach of belief can distort the view of otherwise learned and intelligent people, we need look no further than Thomas Crowley, professor of geosciences at the University of Edinburgh.

Professor Crowley has, reports the paper, taught evolution in North America where fundamentalism is rife and young earth creationism is accepted almost as matter of fact. It doesn't state his credentials - so I can't say that he is (or is not) qualified to teach biological sciences, but nevertheless he feels there is an argument for creation. Writing in the Guardian, here, he says:

"... it [science] cannot in fact explain how 'something' (the energy of the universe compressed into a volume the size of a golf ball) arose from nothing beforehand."

This is entirely true - science has ideas, but no proof of anything prior Big Bang. The professor then disconnects the logical parts of his brain and by adding:

"This yawning logical gap leaves open the possibility that something else may be going on. The history of life is consistent with Darwinian evolution, although life's increasing complexity - including the very recent appearance of modern man - is also consistent with (but not proof of) the possibility of some special creative agent existing."

and, futher:

"It [intelligent design] is embedded in any Christian religion that continues to treat the promise of a messiah, the incarnation and the resurrection as historical fact (the reasoning being that, if God is responsible for creating the big bang, then the incarnation and resurrection would be child's play by comparison)."

This is the old and rather jaded "god of the gaps" argument: which goes, "you can't explain something so God did it."

He continues along a similar path by commenting:

"And it is essential for any teacher to point out that, even if 'soft [old earth] creationism' and 'intelligent design' are true, they cannot be considered science until they make predictions that can be falsified."

But surely this is a case of not just having your cake and eating it, but not even paying for the cake in the first place. If Intelligent Design (which is creationism wrapped in fancy language and complex straw man arguments) is true then we should be able to prove it.

We can show evolution to be true. On the microscopic scale it happens so rapidly that bacteria and other organisms are out-evolving the treatments we devise to protect against them. On a larger scale, things are much slower so we have to look to the fossil record - which is incomplete by its very nature. In some ways, we're lucky to have fossils at all - we burn a lot of fossil goo in our cars every day on the way to work!

The Christian faith and promises that Professor Crowley alludes to were developed from stories thousands of years old at a time when science was something of the future. Even Issac Newton, himself a great scientist, thought that God did everything and his job was just to unravel it all.

Yet there is no tangiable evidence of the supernatural anywhere. The further we walk down the path of enlightenment (scientific enlightenment that is) the deeper our understanding becomes and the more bleak things appear.

Why are we here? We just are.
What is my purpose in life? Life has no purpose - it's just blindly walking into the future.

Some of us, and I assume from what he writes, Professor Crowley is one of them, need to believe there is a higher purpose. This is what drives and ultimately probably buffers them from descent into mental illness. They cling on to the promise of something greater than they are in the hope of eternal life.

The rest of us accept our lot and get on with it. One of us is going to be wrong, but only one is in for a shock.

Professor Crowley can be reached here: thomas.crowley@ed.ac.uk

Mary Kenny Is a Christian: A Dumb One

Mary Kenny writes in the Irish edition of the Independent that atheists are miserable.

"I've never yet met an atheist with a sense of joie-de-vivre (unless, in the case of one well-known public atheist, a certain drunken cordiality) most of them seem to be miserable blighters."

And you Christian types have it all sewn up, don't you, you smug bastards...

Kenny is dumb. Her argument is fallacy and filled with weasel words and she has the temerity to include the story of Baby 'P' almost as if faith could've fixed it.

Fuck you Mary.

Atheists aren't miserable, we're pissed off at people like you looking down your enormous hooters at us. You think you carry the moral high ground yet you allow no one else to tred that same path if their views differ.

Wrong.

Belief does not lead to morals and more than lack of it does otherwise. That's called CHOICE and it's something you idiots would rather we didn't have.