Archive for the ‘Religion & Politics’ Category

Last Sunday the UK celebrated the first Brit to win Wimbledon in 77 years.

Except it wasn’t. It was 77 years since Fred Perry won the men’s singles title, but the last winner of a women’s singles title was Virginia Wade, a mere 36 years ago in 1977. The Guardian sums up the newspaper headlines:

Times: “Murray ends 77-year wait for British win.”
Telegraph: “After 77 years, the wait is over.”
Daily Mail: “Andy Murray ends 77 years of waiting for a British champion.”

You can argue that it was implied that they were taling about the men’s singles title, but that is as much the point – we forget about our female players because the men’s game is considered more important than the female one.

Many people have taken this is a commentary on how we should reflect on our attitudes about women and care more about the women’s game. But this is a universal problem – nobody cares about women’s football. Or women’s golf. Or women’s rugby. Or indeed almost any sport! The men’s game is almost always considered more important.

The simple solution, therefore, is to stop segregating sportspeople by gender.

Do away with men’s and women’s tennis, and just have tennis, where everyone is allowed to complete on the same terms. No more would a female winner of Wimbledon be related to merely being the “women’s title winner”; she would be crowned the greatest tennis player of them all!

I first wrote about this in 2011 while nobody was watching the women’s world cup final that was being shown on BBC3, instead of BBC and ITV simultaneously as the men’s game is. Japan won, by the way.

Combining the competitions into one would stop the second class treatment of women’s sports and allow them to achieve to the highest heights, rather than being restricted by a very opaque non-metaphorical ceiling.

You can argue that women would not be able to compete with men at the same level, but this is, I’m sorry to say, the very definition of prejudice. You have to treat people as individuals and give them the same opportunities are everyone else. Saying “women are often weaker than men, so we’re going to prevent all women from competing” makes no sense in civilised society. Try telling Venus Williams she is too week and feeble to play against you – she’s 70mm taller than I am!

If you should still insist that it would be unfair on women who never get a chance to win, consider that most people don’t. I’m never going to win a Wimbledon tennis title; I an entitled to special circumstances that allow me to win despite not being the best also?

Switching to a characteristic other than gender quickly makes you realise how silly the split gender argument is. Imagine if we decided to split long distance runners based on their skin colour. Have a black marathon and a white marathon. How ridiculous! But when it comes to gender, we find it perfectly acceptable, almost certainly because that is what we have grown up with.

In the modern day, as we strive towards an equal, fair and just meritocracy, everyone should be allowed to compete in the same competition – regardless of skin colour, sexual orientation, or gender.

I’ve done the political compass loads of times over the years, but I thought it would be interesting to see how my views change over time, so I’m going to post my result here for reference.

For comparison, here is a bunch of political leaders mapped out too. Click to enlarge.

Today is Armed Forces Day. A event that I am sure we will all agree to be a very important one.

After all, it’s easy to overlook the armed forces. Too often we think about heros who save likes, likes doctors and firefighters, and forget about those people who do just the opposite – take lives away. In exchange for money.

It’s not easy to shoot in Iraqi civilian in the face. That’s not a joke – it’s genuinely very difficult. And even if you manage it, you then have to live with the fact that you’re a murder for the rest of your life. Even if you leave the military in good physical health, veterans often suffer from post traumatic stress disorder.

So let us take the time to remember those who accept our tax money in exchange for killing other people. The sad reality is that they too are a victim of the military venerating brainwashed society we live in.

In April, I mentioned a Huffington Post article discussing how everyone loves pornography, even in Islamic countries where it is banned.

I thought I would share some stats from some of Worfolk Online’s sites. Here are the most popular countries for our Finnish language site:

• 1. Finland
• 2. Iran
• 3. United States
• 4. Sweden
• 5. Estonia
• 6. Germany
• 7. Pakistan
• 8. United Arab Emirates
• 9. Turkey

Iran appears in the top nine of our English and Swedish language site too, and Saudi Arabia features in the top nine of our English site as well.

Sadly, this photo almost entirely sums up the British attitude towards immigration.

Were you under the impression that you were not allowed to cover your face while in a bank, because of security seasons? I was. But it turns out that I was mistaken.

For privacy reasons, I’ve hidden the identity of the subject, but as you can see, this is a bank customer who has clearly hidden their face. Why is this an issue? Because if they are, but I am now, that is religious discrimination. You have to treat everyone equally, and if you grant or restrict extra privileges for one specific group, you are discriminating.

I wrote to HSBC to ask them to clarify the situation.

To Whom It May Concern:

I was of the understanding that when using your bank, I was not allowed to cover my face for security reasons. However, when I visited your branch on 17 April, I noticed a customer using the banks facilities while wearing a full-face veil. I was hoping you could clarify whether these restrictions have been relaxed?

Yours faithfully,
Chris Worfolk

HSBC phoned me a few days later in response. They said that balaclavas and motor cycle helmets were specifically band, because they are associated with burglaries, but I was otherwise free to cover my face while using their bank.

Recently, Panorama aired a documentary looking at Sharia Courts. You can watch it online if you missed it.

It was certainly an eye opener, though the sad reality is that many of us might not be surprised. The programme contained Islamic scholars recommending to women who said they had suffered domestic abuse should go back to their partners and perhaps try improving their cooking or making more of an effort to look nice, surpassing even the most distasteful sarcastic jokes you could dream up.

Of course, the programme couldn’t point out the end conclusion – that Islam is a bad women. They extensively pushed the idea that these courts were bad for women, or at least some of them where, but never really dared to suggest that the doctrines they are interpreting might partly be at fault too.

Being a libertarian, I’m not sure exactly how we could tackle this situation even if we wanted to though. A mediation service is perfectly acceptable, and indeed encouraged by our own legal system in order to free up more court time. So given Sharia courts are not legally binding and therefore the women there voluntarily submit to them, we have no right to interfere.

In fact, it’s unclear why the women actually wanted a Sharia divorce, when they had already received a civil divorce – given you’re not actually married if you get an Islamic marriage, why would you need a divorce? Just walk away.

There are some issues that can be and do need tackling though.

Firstly and foremost, any compulsion to use the mediation system. Obviously, this needs to be stamped out. This is a difficult one though because if your entire extended family considers the courts to be the law it must be very difficult to ignore. Sure you can just walk away, but that must be like trying to leave a cult. Unfortunately, it is difficult to see how we could tackle that given it is actually the doctrine, not necessarily the system, that is the problem.

Secondly, we can stop so called Sharia marriages. If they want to have a Sharia ceremony, that is fine, we Humanists do the same thing. But marriage is an actual legal term, and if you’re not actually providing a proper legal civil marriage, then calling it a marriage is deceitful and false and ultimately leads to the kind of situations where people getting divorced have no legal protection because they weren’t actually married.

Being the Imperial Western states that we are, we have a habit of going into countries, taking out the dictators (mostly the ones that we originally installed and have been propping up for the past few decades) and forcing democracy on the people.

It has been suggested that this has unfortunately come back to bite us on the ass a few times. Particularly when it comes to Islamic states. After all, what happens if you give democracy to a people and they democratically decide that they want to be enslaved and live under a dictatorship? This might sound like a philosophical thought experiment, but is actually the reality we face – with huge amounts of people brainwashed by the evils of religion, mainly Islam in this case, there is a every chance people might opt for this.

Should we allow it? If we’re ever going to remove democracy from the world and appoint me as the benevolent dictator, we’re going to have to eventually. But on a more serious note, it doesn’t seem right to allow such a thing to happen. Yet, it would seem undemocratic to stop it, if that is what the electorate have chosen.

However, there are possibly some arguments to support an intervention against it.

Firstly, you might be able to argue that it doesn’t make sense logically. It’s the same basic defence to “can god make a rock so big he can’t pick it up” argument – you can’t vote to end democracy because then you wouldn’t have a democracy. Of course you could say well you had one at the time but now it’s gone, but then you could also argue that you never really lived in a democracy if it was contingent on you acting a certain way.

You could argue in a democracy everyone eligible has to be able to have their say. You can argue that if everyone voted for it, then it is the wish of everyone, so it’s fine, but of course not everyone would, but more importantly, the younger generations that were ineligible to vote but would be eligible in the future, should not have that choice taken away from them.

You could also argue that anyone who would vote such a way would be either under duress of mental incapacitation, and therefore ineligible to vote – a state religion that is enforced as strictly as it is in Islamic states would seem to fit both those boxes.

There are some badly put forward points – now I’m hoping my philosopher friends will put forward some coherent and well thought out arguments, as I would be interested to read them.

April is unfortunately suicide month. It’s the month when more people kill themselves than any other. It’s generally believed this is because the lighter days and better weather provide people will the motivation to to do it – ironically, what keeps people alive in the depths of depression is that they’re too depressed to kill themselves.

It’s timely then that the Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM) recently published a report claiming that suicide is now the biggest killer of young men – causing more depths than road accidents, murders and HIV combined.

Full coverage can be found in Metro.

This report echoes the issues already raised in our Men’s Issues awareness campaign. 75% of suicides are male, partly due to the stigma that surrounds men getting help for mental health issues – only 17% of men in need of help will seek it, compared to 29% of women.

Everyone loves porn. That’s a well known fact. Indeed, even in countries were porn is banned (Islamic countries, obviously), porn sites are still some of the most popular sites on the internet according to the Huffington Post, reporting on findings by Alexa.

No wonder sites have been launched to cater for such a niche.

Of course, we shouldn’t be surprised religious states are trying to act against it.

This is all part of religion’s attempt to control the basic desires of human beings, and therefore keep them down. It’s the most sick and twisted part of religion, worse than the killing, the wars, the torture of non-believers and abuse of children that all in themselves are at least on the level of the kind of thing you would call a war crime.

Luckily, as these results show, it doesn’t work. Because as good as god might be, porn is better.