It’s Political Correctness Gone Sensible!

The Daily Mail likes to target the BBC. They are too left-wing, they waste taxpayer’s money. Now I believe the BBC do try to be more inclusive and remain balanced. I accept they do get this wrong from time to time – and sometimes very wrong. Mistakes are made. Live TV, editorial pressures and personal prejudice affect the ability to remain balanced; but they try. It is much easier to maintain an ideological position and, in the words of Richard Littlejohn, “throw bottles”. This is what the Daily Mail does.

Sometimes, the target is because of a perceived editorial stance, or some decision (such as cancelling Last of the Summer Wine). Other times, they simple make stuff up.

Yesterday, the Daily Mail ran with the following front page (cached online version here):

A follow-up to the original article (cached again here) bleated:

“Andrew Marr says he will ignore BBC diktat to stop use of BC and AD.”

Take note of the language. The BBC has apparently forced its staff to stop using the AD/BC date format in favour of the secular terms CE/BCE – “to avoid offending non-Christians”. The articles contain some quotes from religious figures (the Christians say they are offended at the removal, the others say they aren’t offended by AD/BC) as well as the typical Tory rent-a-gobshites. Given that the Daily Mail is a horrendously Islamophobic newspaper – by non-Christians, they mean Muslims. They are again using the ‘them and us’ rhetoric, that implicitly racist position that other religions are coming here and imposing their values on us, to stir up a shitstorm.

For those not familiar with the way the Daily Mail writes articles, allow me to give you a tip. Don’t read the headline; just read the last paragraph. Let’s do that now, as it contains a quote from the BBC on the matter:

“Both AD and BC, and CE and BCE are widely accepted date systems and the decision on which term to use lies with individual production and editorial teams.”

Oh. That matches the headline, doesn’t it?! There is a whole can of worms relating to this writing technique, and how the PCC refuses to regulate this kind of article, where the headline is deliberately contradictory and incorrect. It is a disgrace to journalism and insulting to the readers. To me, it is like saying ‘we are going to lie through our teeth whilst obfuscating the truth to scrape through the regulatory procedure.’

Does the BBC quote say they have ‘turned their backs’? No. Did they issue a “diktat”? No. This is simply made up drivel.

The regular munch bunch of Peter Hitchens, Melanie Phillips and James Delingpole are quick to point out the liberal elite Marxist conspiracy at work here, eroding the rights of the Christians. Get real. If there really is a liberal elite ruling us (not in the economic sense, obviously) – then I suggest they should go and do some investigative journalism and find some stuff out, rather relying on made up shit to justify their incoherent, albeit well-remunerated rants.

This ‘attack on Christianity’ leads me right into another narrative. Political correctness gone mad! The use of politically-correct language, very often meaning secular language, is used as to not cause offense. We don’t say ‘nigger’, ‘paki’, ‘faggot’, ‘pikey’ or ‘spasticated’ – they are deeply offensive terms. Privilege is a bad thing – especially when based on illogical and ideological grounds. Whites, men, heterosexuals and abled people are still more privileged than their counterparts. Why is this the case? Why should any group feel a sense of entitlement, and have it reinforced through dogma, bigotry and stereotypes? Politically-correct language is aimed at a common, neutral ground. It is an attempt at showing an understanding of our differences. Secularism is about ensuring no religion has any privilege over any other religion, or over no religion at all.

In America (a country built upon wave-upon-wave of immigration) it is customary to say ‘Happy Holidays’ rather than ‘Merry Christmas’. Dates too, have cultural significance. We all know of 9/11, but that’s not how a British person would format that date. There are loads of well-documented cultural differences regarding the passage of time. Why should we continue to use a religious convention, when we have a perfectly good secular system? We don’t even know if Christ was born in the year the AD/BC system implies!*

if you believe, truly believe, that your privileges should be reinforced in our culture in favour of others, please leave a comment and say why. I genuinely want to know.

* For more fun on the year 0 and its implications – see Wikipedia.

Pope Blames the Big Bang on God

The Pope has said that God is behind the Big Bang.

I’d like to address a couple of the points that Popey made during this speech.

“Contemplating it [the universe] we are invited to read something profound into it: the wisdom of the creator, the inexhaustible creativity of God.”

No, you and your misconceptions came to that conclusion, based on no repeatable experimental evidence. Further back than that, you are saying this particular God, in his “inexhaustible creativity” is the God that Abraham heard in his head telling him to kill his own son. Hmm. Your faith is not in this God, it is in humanity in general. As a species, we’re the ones who invented this shit in the first place because of our lack of understanding of the world. We are the ones who have crafted religious texts in some other being’s name and refined them over years to fit political needs. That’s why they’re full of inconsistencies. We are the ones who have raged war in the name of these gods, and the particular gods we worship we worship primarily as a result of our society at a given period in time. The faith is clearly not in this imaginary being.

Some Inconsistencies between the Pope and the Good Book

Dogmatic religions are about control. Control through the fear of God, through the fear of God’s punishment, and through the fear of God’s representatives on Earth enforcing those punishments. So put your money in the coffers. This reinforcement of the position of control is why Catholicism has its ‘anti-science’ image, and also why it cannot claim to be a source of morality either.

It seems to me that dogmatic religions are doing whatever they can to maintain a hold of their power in a world that is increasingly realising they have no actual claim to power. Shedding labels such as ‘evil’ and ‘anti-science’ is a start for them. The Pope is not the first person to extrapolate God to the Big Bang and will not be the last; heck he's not even the first Pope to do so. However, by doing so he’s signed up to some other stuff:

• We’re getting closer and closer everyday to understanding the Big Bang. The Pope’s put his weight behind it so surely he has to go along with the evidence that is produced in favour of a Big Bang, or against it when a new, better theory comes along (LOL).
  
• We have an age for the universe we can demonstrate with repeatable experimental evidence. This directly contradicts the 6-day creation period in Genesis. Wait, the literal interpretation of the word of God being wrong? Then why take anything else in a holy book as gospel (if you’d pardon the pun)?
  
• Likewise, we have an age for the Earth which we can demonstrate with repeatable experimental evidence. This directly contradicts the ‘6000 year-old earth view’ that some people hold. If the Pope is willing to accept the Big Bang theory, he has to accept this too.
  
• We then move on to Adam and Eve, the devil, Jesus and all the mindfucking inconsistencies he introduces, the horrid idea of Original Sin and so on. All of these either the Bible can’t decide on a view of events, or cannot provide any evidence, or both. Slowly, reason tears apart these documents. If the Pope is happy to abandon the 6-day creation, then surely these other truths will have to follow.

Of course the Pope is aware of the logical corner this forces him into and came prepared:

“they [scientific theories] only arrive at a certain point ... and do not manage to explain the ultimate sense of reality ...”

This is doing two things:

• Playing with the semantics of the language. Creationists do this all the time with the theory of evolution. Theories are theories are not theorems. Theories, when supported by a wealth of scientific evidence, represent our best interpretation of the state of something. Theorems, like Pythagoras’s, are common in maths but more difficult to establish in science. That in no way undermines the ability of a theory to give an ultimate sense of reality; or justifies a jump into the ‘well it has to be God' logic of the Pope.
  
• On a higher level of abstraction, this is trying to re-establish a border between science and religion. Science has no boundaries, it only presses forward and builds knowledge. When this erodes the power of religions, they should be upfront and re-evaluate their views based on the evidence. Creationism and Intelligent Design aren't even theories.

Conclusion

The Pope has put himself in a strange position, coming out in favour of science, but only if it suits some semi-relevant pre-conceived view (otherwise known as finding evidence to fit a conclusion, although when viewed in detail the evidence isn’t really evidence for that conclusion).

To conclude, I’ll end with a quote from the genius that was Fenyman:

“It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.”

At least the Pope’s doing the job of laying the smackdown to new-world creationists though!