Archive for the ‘Religion & Politics’ Category

Labour MP Graham Stringer and sparked quite a debate by describing dyslexia as a “cruel fiction” invented by big wigs in the education system to cover up the fact that they can’t teach very well.

The charity Dyslexia Action hit back with a statement and claimed that six million people in the UK suffer from it. To be honest though I’m not really convinced such a figure really helps their case. For example the facts don’t really stack up if this figure is true and you take Mr Stringer’s point that…

“If dyslexia really existed then countries as diverse as Nicaragua and South Korea would not have been able to achieve literacy rates of nearly 100%.”

He also makes the interesting point that given there is so much finance support for the condition, it essentially creates an insentive to be bad at reading and writing. Personally I’m not convinced this actually much of an affect but it is certainly plausible that it does.

For further reading you may want to take a glance at the BBC’s coverage and Mr Stringer’s column itself.

This is old news now but I’ve finally got round to uploading my phone pictures.

In case anyone is struggling to read the headline it says…

They’ve stolen all our jobs
1.3m migrants took EVERY Brit vacancy since 2001!

In all seriousness, surely there should be laws against the Daily Star publishing this kind of thing. I mean, people will read this and some will actually believe it! Anyone else thing the BBC should start a campaign to get loads of people to complain?

So did anyone else see the Queen’s speech yesterday?

Now before I get into this, I want to point out that I am a massive royalist. The monarchy is brilliant, they bring in far more money into our country than they cost us, the Queen is a massive symbol of power throughout the world and still head of the Commonwealth and any alternative system would be equally, indeed far more, flawed.

But I was not amused by her speech yesterday. At least by the end of it. When she first started to talk about Jesus as if he was born on December 25th (he wasn’t, Christians have no idea when he was actually born) I laughed but then she just got offensive.

She basically said that the ideas of altruism and being nice to your fellow man were values derived from Christianity and the teachings of Jesus. That is, of course, complete bullshit, I was being nice to people way before I read to Bible as I’m sure you were too not to mention the historical fact that people had civilised societies well before the Abrahamic religions arrived. Indeed all The Bible in reality detracts from altruism by saying you should be good to win favour with God rather than just because it’s the right thing to do.

I think the philosophy you’re actually looking for Elizabeth is Humanism. Because, dare I say it, “just be good for goodness’ sake.”^[1]

Yesterday was our long-awaited interfaith panel in which we invited representatives from each faith down to an open discussion in which the audience could ask questions and each representative could answer with respect to their faith.

In the end we had quite a good panel with Buddhism, Christianity, Mormonism, Sikh, Bahai and Atheism represented. ISoc and JSoc have continued their long-established tradition of refusing to talk to us despite Nicola’s best efforts but I didn’t feel we were missing anything as it worked really well with the good selection of beliefs we already had. John also did a good of chairing the meeting and making sure things didn’t get too out of hand.

As already mentioned we also successfully broadcast the event live for everyone who couldn’t make it in person. It is also available as a saved video clip somewhere, hopefully it will get posted on the A-Soc website in the near future.

All in all, it was a very successfully Give It A Go event for us. We managed to get a total of 45 people down which is probably the best turn out we have had this year.

Having got out of work earlier than planned I headed over to The Terrace to meet Raby have have a bit of a catch up as we’d not seen each other in a month or so. All seems well in the School of Computing, the closure of 24 hours labs is more a change in official policy than something that has actually happened.

Afterwards we headed over to The Park Horse for the talk organised by the Philosophy Society entitled “atheist arguments aren’t much good.” The room was packed out which made for some fantastic photos to add to the A-Soc gallery (what, it was an A-Soc event to attend the talk :p ).

The talk was very interesting and I was impressed by how fast moving it kept with the basic premise being that atheist arguments don’t really work because disproving a specific god doesn’t disprove the idea of a god, it simply disproves that god but you can simply change the definition of god to get round that (for example, he doesn’t need to be all powerful, as this is never said in the Bible, he could just be rather powerful).

Of course this argument doesn’t hold up because if you accept there may be some kind of god but choose not to believe in any of the specific gods then you’re an atheist. It isn’t Atheism with a capital T (or positive atheism or whatever you wish to call it) but it certainly is atheism but regardless it was an interesting talk and well worth attending.

I’m not sure John took too kindly to my thoughts on philosophy as a subject though lol.

Last night was the union council meeting to look at what motions should make it to the referendum or not. Myself, Norm, Nicola, Moz and Gijsbert turned up to support motion 4 and while it’s probably a good job we did, it didn’t do us much good.

I have written a more in depth article for Leeds Student (and anyone else who wants to run it) which we’ll be sending in along with all our other articles in the hope some of it will make it to the next issue, but I will briefly summarise things here.

First of all, amendment 4 passed which removed “this union resolves” part 1, which was to stop stocking Halal and Kosher meat. From a motion to remove Halal and Kosher meat from the union. There is no way that is constitutional! The union council rules state they cannot pass amendments that “significantly alter the nature of the motion.” How could you ever, ever come up with a less appropriate amendment? How could you change it’s nature any more than that?

The amount of open descrimination against the atheist community was also quite clear. It didn’t seem to matter how many times union council members had gone on and on about how this is about whether motions should go forward to referendum, not about the politics of each issue, union council members repeatedly voiced their own opinions and yet hardly any of them mentioned the core issue here – animal welfare.

Finally it would seem important in what is aiming to be a democractic process that union council members are free to vote how they wish. It is interesting then that when Barry abstained from voting on the motion (not even voted for it but simply abstained) he was ridiculed by the chair and asked to give reasons for his decisions.

All of this amounts to showing the clear descrimination that goes on, on campus against the atheist community.

Well, it’s over. America has a black president. A very white black president but a black president none the less. And rightfully so too, Obama is the man for the job.

We held somewhat of an election party to watch the results come in last night. With the projector hucked up to project accross our lounge wall and the sound system hucked into it too it was more than big enough to enjoy a life size picture of Christopher Hitchens when he appeared on the BBC’s panel.

Having work I went to grab some sleep not long before 4am and everyone else had dispersed by the time I got up but never the less it was a fun night. And I’m now loaded up with several litres of energy drinks at work so I should be able to make it through the day 😀 .

BBC News have an audio clip of Russell Brand’s show the week after the infamous Jonathon Ross show. In it he apologises for what he said to Andrew Sachs but points out that The Daily Mail are a bunch of simple minded racists who supported Hilter and thereby vicariously killed millions of Jews.

Fantastic 😀 . This couldn’t show how silly this whole situation is. I haven’t heard a word of complaint about this but make some amusing phone calls and you’re done for. Have a listen.

Because I need to write to them.

They are now on what, 30,000 complaints? The stats for that are everything. But how many people have written in and said “you know, what Russell Brand and Jonathon Ross said was really, really funny! Keep this kind of content up!”

Firstly, the idea that the BBC got 30,000 complaints about the incidient isn’t even close to true. Because day by day the number went up. So most people clearly didn’t actually here the show, they just decided to complain when The Daily Mail wrote a story about it. It’s Jerry Springer: The Opera all over again.

Secondly, if we want to talk about inappropriate, let’s talk about the fact The Sun then went and interviewed Andrew Sachs’ granddaughter. I mean, what is the need? It’s not just mean right? That is just stirring up trouble?

The important issue though is that what was said was not really beyond the line. It certainly wasn’t fire everyone in sight and suspend those you pay too much to fire. It was a bit on the edge, but nothing you really would think “wow, can they really say that” given it was on late night radio. I leave people those kind of voicemails all the time. Not exactly like that but if you don’t turn up to something you should be at, expect an abusive voicemail. We handed out plenty of abuse to Norm for bailing on the podcast in the most recently recorded shows.

Have you read the interviews with Andrew Sachs? He wasn’t even that offended. An apology from Russell and Jonathon was enough as far as he was concerned, he didn’t want to take it any further.

The real jem in this story though is the fact that nobody at the BBC thought it was past the line. It wasn’t like it was a live show that they suddenly blurted out the comments on before anyone could stop them. It was a pre-recorded show that has to go through editors and producers before it is broadcast. All of which seemingly gave the green light.

If you haven’t had a listen yet, head over to YouTube and check it out.

Emily Barran has written an excellent feature on how capitalism is being blamed for the economic crunch in the October 24th edition of LS2.

While it’s easy to blame banking executives, she rightly points out people aren’t pointing the fingers at themselves after taking out 100% mortgages that realisticlly, they could never really afford. I was listening to a woman who is now a single parent complaining the bank was repossessing her house. Of course they are. Indeed, as a shakeholder in Nothern Rock now it has been nationalised I insist they do repossess your house to get their money back. You can’t afford your house, move to a cheaper one, they are desperate to sell them at the moment.

And what exactly is the result of the credit crunch anyway? Having discussed it on my podcast, neither myself nor Gijsbert said we had changed our lifestyle because of it. How has it really affected your life? Probably not that much. A capitalism economy fluctuates, that doesn’t given you an excuse to take out a massive loan then complain when you can’t make the payments. That just makes you an idiot.