As Richard Littlejohn would say, you couldn’t make it up. Credit.
When my friend Norman dared to suggest that a skeptical philosophy should include the ability to challenge our own beliefs, he was quickly buried under a landslide of “how dare you” reactionary opinion.
Moral outrage as a substitute for rational argument. Where have we seen that before? So, I’ve taken the liberty of reframing said post into a most fitting surrounding.
You have to wonder, at what point while Ophelia Benson was reading a story about a live kitten someone had encased in concrete up to the front legs, did she stop thinking about what a despicable act it was, and start thinking “I could use this for my own purposes.”
I was reading the Daily Mail’s coverage of Ed Miliband’s interview in which he said that he didn’t do god. He did of course say he has great respect for people who do and I may write about that later (I haven’t heard Cameron say he has great respect for non-believers, persumably because that’s most of us) but one thing I did find interesting was the Daily Mail poll which asked the following.
Does it matter that Ed Miliband does not believe in God?
Let’s pretend it isn’t offensive for them to suggest that the idea that his is an atheist makes him a bad person (one wonders whether they would have run a poll on “does it matter that x is a Muslim?”) and consider how to answer it.
My first reaction was to tick “no.” Because we all know what the poll is really about – as outlined above, do we think the fact that Ed Miliband is an atheist is detrimental to his character. If you answer yes, you do think that, if you answer no you don’t think that.
But of course it isn’t as simple as that. In actual fact, when considering the question does it matter to me that Ed Miliband is a non-beliver the answer is, yes it does. It matters a great deal to me! Just not in the way that the Daily Mail would imagine it might.
In fact, it probably matters to a lot of people. This is a man who could well be the prime minister of the United Kingdom in a few years time – it matters a great deal that he isn’t some mad crackpot religious nut. Especially when the last one turned out to be hiding his religious quackery until after he had sent hundreds of British servicemen to their deaths after some good healthy praying about it.
So yes, it does matter that Ed Miliband is an atheist. It’s great news.
For the record, at the time of casting my vote, 61% said it didn’t matter, with the other 39% saying it did.
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.