Religion

An angry parent has told us that the Gideons have visited her child's school, where they contributed to an act of collective worship and gave every child a Bible. Most people have heard of Gideon Bibles being left in hotel rooms, but they distribute them in many other places too. On their website they say,

We are aware that many people in Britain have never seen a Bible and may be uncertain what it is.

Our aim is to give them the opportunity to read it for themselves, perhaps for the first time, and to discover God in a personal way.

The Gideons place Bibles or New Testaments in many areas including:

Hotels
Hospitals
Prisons
Student Accommodation
Care Homes
Medical Centres

Additionally we make personal presentations of God's Word.

Each year we present personal copies of the New Testament and Psalms to children in thousands of British secondary schools and to many university and college students.

We make personal presentations to medical personnel and uniformed services - Armed Forces, Police, Ambulance and Fire.

We place New Testaments at hospital bedsides.

Quite apart from the fact that it isn't appropriate to allow groups like this to proselytise in schools, the Bible isn't a guide for life, as we reported earlier. When teachers allow this to happen, maybe they haven't considered why they shouldn't? Suffolk's SACRE (Standing Advisory Council for Religious Education) has provided some guidelines for schools on visitors to RE lessons and assemblies.

Interesting piece in the New York Times by Eric Weiner, on Americans and organised religion.

For a nation of talkers and self-confessors, we are terrible when it comes to talking about God. The discourse has been co-opted by the True Believers, on one hand, and Angry Atheists on the other. What about the rest of us?

The rest of us, it turns out, constitute the nation’s fastest-growing religious demographic. We are the Nones, the roughly 12 percent of people who say they have no religious affiliation at all. The percentage is even higher among young people; at least a quarter are Nones.

In my experience, even more British people are Nones too, and can you blame them? Angry atheism is as off-putting to many people as in your face religion. What's wrong with keeping your beliefs private? It would make a change.

This week's National Secular Society e-newsletter quotes Irish writer Jennifer Johnston saying, "Personally I think that religion should be abolished and I think when you look around we're doing not too bad a job of it in this country at the moment. It's all just moving and about time, too." This was in an interview with the Irish Independent. Johnston's attitude is understandable, when you read about her own and her family's experience of Catholicism, but abolishing religion isn't the answer. I remember being shocked when, some time ago, I heard one of the British Humanist Association's leading activists say more or less the same thing - and he was serious. It's an attitude that persists in online atheist forums. Calling for the abolishment or banning of religion isn't a rational response to the problems that it causes. It was tried by the Soviets and by the Chinese during the Cultural Revolution, but they only succeeded in driving it underground. There have always been extremists, religious and atheist, and they've always caused destruction.

The answer is secularism, or an end to religion in civil affairs and no religious instruction in schools. Children might learn about religion but not to be religious. Teach children to think, not to believe. Most organised monotheistic religion is about power. Remove that power, and you remove most of the damage it causes.

"A good teacher makes you think, even when you don’t want to." (Tom, aged 10)

Teach people to think, and maybe they won't make foolish statements like, "Ban religion!"

This is a letter in this week's National Secular Society e-news:

We have a 4 year old son who has just started attending our local non-denominational community School. Last week, along with the rest of his year-group he was presented with an illustrated children's Bible.

We were given the option to opt-out of this but did not exercise this because we didn't want our son to feel excluded and trusted the school that the book would be age-appropriate. It was not and our son ended up in tears over the violent illustrations of the crucifixion.

Many other parents were unhappy and we personally are complaining to the school. We have subsequently found out that he Bible's distribution and funding was carried out by a Charity – Bibles for Children. According to their website they are active in hundreds of primary schools across the country (there is a list in their annual report). We would like to warn other members with children who may be targeted by these people and who might want to take action against these people either on principle or in order to prevent their kids being exposed to images of graphic violence.

We've had emails from parents whose children want to join the Guides or Scouts, but have been shocked to find that they're expected to make a promise to "love God". Letters and emails to the association have failed, so far, to achieve any sort of compromise. Now, after persistent campaigning by the National Secular Society and the British Humanist Association, Girl Guides may no longer have to pledge to "love God" as part of their Guide promise. Presumably, this would apply to Scouts too. An increasing number of parents have complained that the current pledge discriminates against children who don't have a religious faith. If they make the promise, they have to lie. Some have opted for the alternative organization, the Woodcraft Folk (which ignores religion) if there's a branch in their area.

Today's Telegraph reports,

... the association is considering reviewing the wording of its affirmation for new members, to remove religious references.

The move comes after parents complained it was unfair to exclude children who had not received a Christian upbringing.

It's Operation Christmas Child time again, when well-meaning people are encouraging their children to fill shoe boxes with gifts for needy children overseas. But Operation Christmas Child, run by the evangelical American organisation Samaritan's Purse, has a destructive agenda. Please don't support them. Click here to read about "Mad Missionaries and Toxic Gifts".

The BHA has some suggestions for alternatives to Samaritan's Purse - click here to see their website.

There is a Campaign against Operation Christmas Child, that describes OCC as "Racist & Poisonous":

What most people don't know is that the organisation behind it - Samaritans Purse - is run by that well known islamophobe Franklin Graham - who calls Islam "a very wicked and evil religion". It's the same group that rode with Israeli army convoys into Lebanon during Israel 's 1982 invasion, and again followed US troops in to Iraq to claim Muslims for Christ.

In 1990 they sent 30,000 arabic bibles for US troops to hand out to the defeated Iraqis - literally at gun point. In Afghanistan their 2003 report proudly declared that with help from the Canadian military; they got "MUSLIM children in the capital city of Kabul to celebrate Christmas for the first time".

Their stated aim is the "advancement of the Christian faith through... the relief of poverty". Christian leaders in the UK have condemned this version of Christianity as "racist" and "poisonous". 

Their poison isn't just directed at Muslims, they refer to Hindus as being "bound by Satan's power" and were caught preying on Catholic earthquake victims in El Salvador in 2001- refusing them temporary homes provided by US AID unless they first attend a half hour evangelising "prayer" session. Afterwards Frankilin Graham gloated that in one village they converted 150 Catholics.

You can be sure that Samaritan's Purse has an equally bigoted view of atheists.

Click here for an example of Samaritan's Purse literature that's delivered to children.

Continued > > >

There are many atheists and self-styled humanists who are so anti-religious that they don't want to know anything about it. When they talk about Islam, say, it becomes evident that they know very little about Muslims, and have probably never knowingly spoken to one. As far as they're concerned, Islam is a threat, and that's all there is to it.

When it comes to our quality of life, what matters is how people behave, not what they believe. This applies to atheists and humanists too, some of whom could do with lessons in manners. There are times when this sort of attitude leads atheists to do very silly things, like Richard Dawkins' response to the Haitian earthquake. To demonstrate that humanists are caring people, he set up a separate fund from all the well-established disaster relief funds. A lot of atheists won't donate to the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) because some of the organisations involved have a religious ethos and they imagine that the money might be used for proselytising, instead of food, shelter and welfare. Dawkins' fund, which was promoted by the BHA, was channelled through PayPal, an American money transfer system, which meant that British donors couldn't take advantage of the Gift Aid scheme, so their donations were worth less than they would have been through DEC. This was inexcusable, considering that there are British disaster relief charities without a religious ethos, and that donors could have gone direct to any of them. Humanists are supposed to be rational people, but this wasn't very rational.