Archive for the ‘Religion & Politics’ Category

We often joke about Godwin’s law so it’s easy to forget that sometimes, people are actually silly enough to try and use it as a legitimate argument.

A few months ago, 4Thoughts, a series of short commentaries by Channel 4, did a week on religious slaughter, a topic which I wrote about a few days ago. The first of which was by a man named Chanoch Kesselman who literally said, the first thing the Nazi’s did was to ban ritual slaughter, and then they killed six million Jews. You can watch the video here.

In total there were seven videos on the subject, though they didn’t prevent a very balanced argument. Only one of the videos was by a non-religious person, the rest were from believers. Two of which were Christians, but you really can’t call what they said being supportive to either side. Only Helen Rossiter made the case that animal welfare considerations might want to play a part in a decision about animal welfare.

On April 10th, I wrote to all my local MEPs, asking them to support legislation in the European parliament which would require all meat to be clearly labelled as to whether it was slaughtered by humane of religious methods.

If you aren’t aware of the background, animals slaughtered in the UK must be done do by first pre-stunning the animal to make it unconscious before you kill it. However, Islamic and Jewish communities have an exemption from this law which allows them to slaughter the animal while still fully conscious by slitting their throat and then leaving them to slowly bleed to death as they thrash around in pain. It’s pretty horrific, which is why the governments advisory board, the Farm Animal Welfare Council, advised the exemption should be removed immediately.

What is worse however, is that many restaurants and shops, including high street supermarkets, often sell Halal meat as regular meat, without any labeling – you could be eating meat from an animal that was unethically slaughtered and not even know it.

While the ultimate solution is to remove this exception, which would be the fair thing to do in our modern secular society – we’re not asking for anything special, just that the law by applied to us all equally without the current discrimination that happens, at the very least it should be a requirement to label meat as having come from religious slaughter, so that those of us with an ethical conscience, can choose to avoid it.

Only three of the MEPs I wrote to responded, here is what they said:

Timothy Kirkhope MEP from the Conservatives told me that his colleague, which sits on the ENVI committee was doing everything possible to support this legislation, stressing that his concern was animal welfare and allowing consumers to make an informed choice.

Godfrey Bloom MEP from UKIP told me that he opposed the legislation because he didn’t support any legislation that came from Europe and therefore detracted from our sovereign power. From what I can work out, it seems UKIP candidates just sit in the European Parliament and cheer at the entire proceedings. Still, that is probably what the electorate want them to do.

Linda McAvan MEP from Labour told me that she supported legislation that required meat to be properly labelled and had voted for this before – but would not be voting on this one because they didn’t feel it was appropriate (nothing to do with it having been proposed by a Conservative of course).

She also said it was important that religious slaughter, while it should be properly labelled, should be allowed to continue. I replied to her on this, challenging the idea of religious privilege over applying the law fairly and consistently to all. She responded, saying that the views of the Muslim and Jewish communities took precedence but also said that while the exemption exists, 80-90% of religiously slaughtered animals were actually pre-stunned.

On Thursday May 5th, I voted yes to the alternative vote.

Not strictly because I actually wanted the alternative vote, but because the no campaign had been so shocking immoral. If it wasn’t massively exaggerating the cost of implementing AV by including the cost of the referendum (which thanks to the no campaign we still had to pay for even though nothing has changed) it was billboards with messages like “she needs a maternity ward, not an alternative vote.” As soon as that slogan was released, they should have lost the argument on something equivalent to Godwin’s Law.

Not to mention that most of the no campaign has been based on complete lies. Their website scare mongers with claims AV would elect the BNP even though under AV it would actually be more difficult for the BNP to get elected. They trick people by saying almost nobody uses AV even though many countries use even more progressive systems than AV.

Clearly there is something very much wrong with the morality lf those on the side of the no campaign. Even before you discover the BNP are opposed to AV as well.

Some people would argue that simply not liking one side of the argument isn’t a good enough reason to vote for the other. Unfortunately, we weren’t provided with much else to make the decision on.

The yes campaign was appalling. I got a flyer taking about “more of the same” and fat cat MPs getting expenses and still to this day it remains a mystery as to how these could be considered arguments for AV. Dan Snow’s video was excellent but I only watched it a few days after the referendum which leads me to believe that most people didn’t see it at all.

The yes campaign simply failed to convince people that AV was a good idea.

The second problem, is that the yes campaign simply doesn’t have that strong an argument. First past the post is a good system, it means the person with the most votes wins. While it does mean that less than 50% of people vote for the chosen candidate that less people wanted to elect that another candidate. AV, on balance, probably is a better system. But only just.

Which leads me on to my other reason for voting for AV. Ultimately, it’s a step forward to a more progressive system of voting. If we ever do want to move to a more proportional representation system, this would have been a good stepping stone. Not to mention that if it did turn out to be a rubbish system in reality, we could just change it back. That’s the great thing about trying new things. But alas, it’s not to be.

On Sunday, there was a trade union march through Leeds city centre.

While the front of the march seemed quite sensible, there point was somewhat undermined by the back of the procession with parties around Revolution just yelling obscenities through a megaphone rather than making any kind of serious political point.

For the final session of Perspective Citywide, Nicola Jackson presented a talk on Judaism.

For the seventh session of Perspective Citywide, we were joined by Malcolm Deboo who traveled up from London to talk to us about Zoroastrianism. London boasts Europe’s only Zoroastrianism centre and Malcolm presented a fascinating look at a religion which very few people are familiar with.

For the Paganism session of Perspective Citywide, we welcomed Rhiannon Grant to the group. I had already seen the talk at the Atheist Society the previous Friday but it was never the less entertaining and the discussions were great.

Last Sunday, myself, James and Elina headed down to Hope City Church.

Officially I think they come under the label of a “charismatic” church, which means they are hip, young and evangelical. They were founded twenty years ago by a mysterious figure that everyone refers to as Pastor Dave and has now spread to six different cities – one of which is in Africa.

Their new “Megacentre” is located in a former warehouse, which seems to be the trendy place to put a church these days and as we went in, we made or way to the brand new auditorium complete with an iMac controlled technical set-up, full band on stage and video link-up facilities so they can broadcast the news from across the Hope City Church family.

After the service, Joel very kindly sorted us out with tea and coffee (actually, I somewhat threw them when I asked if they had any cold drink) and we hung out in the “Impressions Cafe” on some very comfortable sofas. The biscuits were good but not quite up to the standard of York Rock Church which even had branded cups!

We came away with a welcome pack of goodies which included Hope City Church magazine, which was incredibly glossy and well printed, and featured a story on 20 years of Hope City Church. It was interesting to see that they had tried to start a number of satellite churches over the past two decades, some of which had worked out, others apparently hadn’t. It was interesting to see that they have become a success story – expanding into Frankfurt this November – by sheer force of will and not giving up. It may not be our cause, but it could certainly be good inspiration.

On Saturday, Mark Edon delivered a talk to Leeds Skeptics on the subject of Creationism. Mark is on the committee for the British Centre for Science Education which is a religiously-neutral organisation which aims to combat creationism and you can tell they do great work because the creationists have even built an “exposed” website about them 😀 .

If you are interested in learning more about the BCSE, you can find their website here and even join for free too.

Last Friday, Gijsbert Stoet presented the One Life session on Human Needs.

One of the interesting discussions that came up was when Gijsbert got us to imagine we were 30 years old and we had kids. The task was to list everything we thought our kids would need in order to live a happy life.

He also asked us to differentiate the lists between boys and girls, if we felt that there was a difference.

But almost nobody did. Obviously I pointed out that a girl needed a pony to be truly happy, but beyond that people produced pretty much identical lists because ultimately this is 2010 and all things being equal, why would you treat boys and girls differently? That isn’t the say there aren’t differences – of course there are – but it terms of bringing up kids, none of us would take the attitude “oh he is a boy so he’ll want to do x or she is a girl so she will want to do y.” Gives you a nice feeling inside with respect to gender equality.

It is also in stark contrast to some of the discussions we have been having recently – many of us are getting annoyed by the sheer quantity of event invites we get on Facebook from the Islamic Society that we are not allowed to attend because they are “sisters only events.”