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This video was for me hard, conclusive evidence that only our Lord God could have brought about life on Earth. If peanut butter cannot spontaneously produce new life, all of our so-called scientific theories on the creation of life must be false. I’m just sorry I was wrong for so long. Lord, forgive me.
It all sounds innocent enough. Operation Christmas Child “is a unique ministry that brings Christmas joy, packed in gift-filled shoeboxes, to children around the world”. Over the past 10 years, 24 million shoeboxes have been delivered, making it the world’s largest children’s Christmas project. Every US president since Ronald Reagan has packed a shoebox for Operation Christmas Child. In the UK, thousands of schools, churches and youth clubs are doing the same. Some will fill their boxes with dried-out felt tip pens and discarded Barbie amputees. Others spend serious money on the latest GameBoy or Sony Walkman.
But what many parents and teachers don’t know is that behind Operation Christmas Child is the evangelical charity Samaritan’s Purse. Their aim is “the advancement of the Christian faith through educational projects and the relief of poverty”. And a particularly toxic version of Christianity it is. This is the same outfit that targeted eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall and was widely condemned for following US troops into Iraq to claim Muslims for Christ.
The evangelicals who like to giftwrap Islamophobia | Guardian daily comment | Guardian Unlimited.
My friend Nick has received a barrage of protest letters after writing an article in the Huddersfield Daily Examiner about Operation Christmas Child. His article is a lot less strongly worded than the one above, and the one above was written by the vicar of Putney, The Rev Dr Giles Fraser. Nick expressed disappointment that there were so few letters of support for his article – but he can’t be surprised. Zealous god-botherers are bound to get steamed up and writing letters if anyone buggers about with their warm-and-fuzzies, and most people who agreed with it couldn’t be bothered to write and say so, even though they should.
So I’m working in a developing country – Siem Reap’s slick bakery cafe, free wi-fi and numerous bars are an island of affluence in a country where most are below the poverty line and earning less than a dollar fifty a day, HIV/AIDS, dengue fever and TB are widespread, and, well, you know the rest. Samaritan’s Purse shoeboxes have already already been delivered to Cambodia. It’s bad enough that a child in one of our classes at the Sangkheum Center the other day was found looking up ‘Sin’ in the dictionary after being given a copy of The Book Of Hope, now I dread the prospect of these boxes showing up, containing as they do more evangelical literature, aimed at converting children to Christianity. As mentioned in the article above, this is partly achieved through bigoted statements about other faiths, and partly through bible study courses after the children receive the gifts.
A video on the Samaritan’s Purse website features several dewey-eyed god-botherers talking of Operation Christmas Child giving gifts of unconditional love, but it isn’t unconditional love when you bribe children into adopting your belief in God with a cuddly toy, any more than it is when you ask a poor person to pray in exchange for food. If the gift is so unconditional, give it with no strings attached. Donate money to an aid organisation, come and help, do something more useful and sustainable than sending someone a teddy bear in a shoe box, and feel justifiably warm and fuzzy – but no-one has the right to force a particularly bigoted and pernicious brand of the Christian faith down children’s throats, even if it is giftwrapped.
After my first English class this afternoon, one of my young adult group handed me a glossy but cheaply produced booklet, the Book of Hope. They had been given it at high school this morning. This book contained pages of advice with titles such as Love, Sex, Health, Career, and Addiction. These are themes that may be playing on the minds of teenagers, so your timing, sir, was impeccable, and providing the book in English and Khmer was particularly thoughtful.
It’s just the way that you interspersed all of this advice with passages from the Bible that disturbs me.
A page on sex juxtaposed with The Sermon on the Mount – do you think maybe this is likely to lead to confusion? What is the relevance of a discourse on holiness to the sexual education of these people? Trust an evangelist to try and completely fuck up people’s heads with biblical passages rather than giving them any useful advice on some of the most intimate areas of their lives.
The dictionary in the back of the booklet was highly amusing, however. A is for Abraham. B is for Baptism. C is for Commandment. I particularly liked H for Herod, K for King David, and S for Sin. Useful, relevant English for the modern world.
To be fair, brazenly handing out chunks of bible is not half as sneaky as the tactics of some evangelist groups, like free English lessons for poor kids that are little more than sermons, or my favourite, asking Khmers to pray in exchange for healthcare or food. You’ve not sunk that low… have you?
So let me inform you that should you come anywhere near one of my classes with your literature, unless it is part of a fair and balanced religious studies curriculum (which we are planning), I shall be happy to suggest you shove your booklets where even the holy light from your Lord Jesus Christ doesn’t shine.
I never expect much of The British Humanist Association (BHA), but their opinion poll- well, it almost defies belief in its absurdity. It’s difficult to know where to start with it.
The article quoted above from the new Philosophers’ Magazine blog criticises the recent survey findings of the British Humanist Association, where they claimed that 36% of UK adults are in fact Humanists in their outlook. The main criticism is related to the use of questions to identify Humanist traits in the respondent that are not necessarily reliable indicators of a Humanist outlook (at least, that’s the gist I got).
An example given is a question about whether the respondent’s belief in religion or science gives them a more complete understanding of the universe. The main flaw with this question is obviously that many religious people are willing to accept Darwinian evolution theory, Human Genome research and the Big Bang as plausible explanations for life, the universe and everything – while they still believe in God. You may disagree, but Humanists don’t have the monopoly on rationality, and religious people are not all as stupid or insane as George W Bush.
What the BHA survey does is attempt to corral people into the category of Humanist, simply because they have ticked a few of the right boxes. In matters of spirituality and religion, many people I know have ideas which mark them as Humanists in their outlook, but they are unlikely to classify themselves as Humanists simply because they don’t even feel the need to be categorised in the first place – why wear a badge when you’ve had enough of religions asking you to and you’re happy as you are? Maybe 36% of UK adults are Humanists, but 36% of UK adults won’t be wearing any badges or joining the BHA any time soon, so the entire exercise is somewhat academic.
To be fair to the BHA, most surveys are a complete waste of time. A percentage figure works when you talk about food ingredients or fundraising totals, but not for surveys where Humans have been asked to give an opinion. The two reasons for this – Humans write the surveys, and Humans respond to them. The Humans writing the surveys ask questions either too preoccupied with what questions sound good or what answers they want to hear, and the Humans responding to them either don’t understand the questions, lie, tell you what they think you want to hear, or don’t know what they think in the first place.
Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees. Despite promising a prompt review of its approval for a book claiming the Grand Canyon was created by Noah’s flood rather than by geologic forces, more than three years later no review has ever been done and the book remains on sale at the park, according to documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).
Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility: News Releases.
Oh, the horror. The horror.
Richard Dawkins finds the title ‘New Atheist’ laughable, and so do I. What the hell is a New Atheist? Am I a New Atheist or an Old Atheist? Are New Atheists trendier, better looking or richer? According to the Dilbert Blog, New Atheists are now also New Gays. This is getting absurd. Dawkins compared the plight of atheists in the US to that of gays thirty or so years ago, so giving birth to another crazy nickname. Atheists are accused by the religious of being religious themselves (the line ‘you believe there is no god’, so oft-repeated, suggests that Atheism is itself a faith position), so all in all, I might be part of some weird new religion called the New Gays. I don’t want to be a New anything. There’s a time limit on being New unless you’re watching the News, and look how New Labour turned out.
Adrianne’s fighting Weenies. Dough’s commenting on the area he lives in, and fighting a rear guard action against his tyrannical employers. Wascally Weasal is getting in to the history of Malta. Mum’s contemplating the prospect of an afterlife. Blogs are wonderfully diverse things. I’m getting tired of ranting about religion however, because as Dough points out, it’s almost a complete waste of time. Arguing with the devoutly religious is like shouting at a brick wall, and I sometimes do feel bad about attacking the religion which is shared by people I know and like – moderate religious friends of mine will agree with me about the lunacy of the neo-conservative Christian right in the US, faith schools, or the wearing of burqas, so in the end, the divide may not be between believers and disbelievers, simply between rational people and fundamentalists. Most of us, at least in this country, do seem to agree on the important things – at least the ones who have bothered to think about it. The people who really deserve a kick up the arse are all the intellectually lazy, conceited Weenies that would sooner die than use their brains, form an opinion, express it and argue it. Apathy will kill us all.
The argument for ranting against ‘dyed-in-the-wool faith-heads’ (as Richards Dawkins has put it in about a million interviews recently) is that their energy for coersion, manipulation, indoctrination, lobbying, fundraising, killing, terrorising and generally fucking up the world in multivarious other ways is almost without limits, and there has to be a balance. That’s why I will carry on, but try and achieve my own balance. Talk about religion maybe, but only if I can find something constructive to offer as an alternative.
As an afterthought, it appears the birds in St James’ Park are turning cannibal, where a Pelican has just swallowed a pigeon. Poor pigeon maybe - but is this a new, rather surreal form of pest control?
Quite Random is the blog of Nathan Nelson, a human male who lives in the UK and is not entirely sure what he's going to do when he grows up but is interested in international development, photography, secularism, technology, music and movies and other things anyone of his age would be.
