The Damned

Last night saw BBC2′s first screening of a new documentary from Gonzoesque broadcaster Louis Theroux following the further exploits of the infamous Phelps family and their cohorts, the insane bigots behind the God Hates [insert pretty much anything] campaigns, America’s Most Hated Family in Crisis.

Theroux has once before courted Phelps et al. In 2007 he presented the documentary The Most Hated Family In America which was most likely the first time that many in the UK had been exposed to the biblical wingnuttery of the Westboro Baptist Church (who easily manage to put the biblically-inspired antics of our home-grown fundie cause célèbre, Stephen “Birdshit” Green, in the shade) and it made for television that was tragic, hilarious and not a little frightening.

Before airing, this new documentary was primed in an article by Theroux, who explained:

Normally I don’t do follow-ups. But I’d made an exception in this case because of an e-mail I’d received from one of the fire-breathing young zealots I’d interviewed on my first trip, announcing she’d left the church. She cited our conversations as one of the influences.

She had now changed her life, found a boyfriend and had zero contact with anyone still inside the church, including her family. A little research revealed that several others I’d met on my first visit were also now apostates. This included Steve’s own daughter, Lauren.

Intriguing.

Of course, the WBC thrives on publicity, no matter what the content of that publicity says. Criticism and opprobrium are—to them—seen as validation and vindication (as a prototypical example of an extreme christian persecution complex) that they must be doing it right. Theroux continues:

Some have asked why the Phelpses allowed us back in having seen the first film. They were in their own weird way fans, seeing our original effort as (I think) basically fair – and more importantly regarding it as part of their destiny to have their message widely heard and then rejected.

The Phelpses picketed the funeral of Albert Snyder’s son and he is battling them in court
For the broad mass of humanity to go to hell, they must have first been exposed to the gospel and failed to heed it. Our programme had been seen by millions around the world. In my own way, I had a part in the divine plan. And so I’d made my way back to Zion, as they like to call their block of houses on a suburban street in Topeka, for a week-long stay.

I didn’t see the show (and—let’s be frank—it is a show) as it was being transmitted as I was too busy arguing in the pub (vodka + foreign policy and ethics + a philosopher + an evolutionary psychologist = interesting conversations) but it’s available on the BBC’s iPlayer (available until Sunday 10th April 2011) so I’ll be watching it at some point today.

For those of you outside the UK, some enterprising soul has liberated it from the pearly clutches of Auntie Beeb and put it up onto a public video site, details of which you will find at Unreasonable Faith.

Enjoy.

Professor Brian Cox uses this year's Huw Wheldon Memorial Lecture to address the main challenges in bringing science to television. He tackles the risks in simplifying science for a television audience, the perils of abandoning fact in the name of balance and the importance of making science on television intellectually and emotionally engaging.

Yes, it’s (again) that time of year when we who don’t-make-claims-to-know-that-there’s-an-invisible-man-in-the-sky-who-wants-to-hurt-us-forever-after-we-die because we don’t-make-claims-to-know-that-there’s-an-invisible-man-in-the-sky-who-wants-to-hurt-us-forever-after-we-die make noises about having our voices deliberately excluded from the Thought for the Day segment of the Today programme on Radio 4.

*sigh*

The Telegraph has an article describing how the BBC Trust, the governing body of the corporation that decides the rules and procedures to be followed by the BBC, is deliberating whether to include non-religious voices in the segment.

From the article at The Telegraph:

Mark Damazer, the channel’s controller, has said that the slot on the flagship programme could “take in a wider range of voices”.

Secularists claim the item discriminates against non-believers and have complained to the Trust, the governing arm of the corporation, which will deliver its response in the Autumn.

Mr Damazer said: “There may well be quite a strong argument for including secularists and humanists” but, he added, “it’s absolutely not a cut and dried issue”.

Responding to listener complaints on Radio 4’s Feedback programme, he said: “You should know that the BBC Trust … is currently considering this question and they will come to some kind of conclusion later on this year.”

The two minute slot should give a voice to a wide range of religions and a voices to those from around the UK rather than “metropolitan figures sitting in a studio in Broadcasting House or the news centre in west London”, he said.

“It is I think satisfyingly diverse [but] that does not mean that it should never change its remit or the criteria for selection and I think it is worth looking at,” he added.

Of course, it’s the usual suspects that want to exclude non-believers from voicing opinions on moral and ethical concerns.

However, faith leaders have criticised the move saying that in an increasingly secular climate, it was “vitally important” that religion retains its voice.

Steve Clifford, General Director of the Evangelical Alliance said: “The Today programme has no problem running slots for business and sport, so why shouldn’t it have a slot dedicated to religion? It strikes me that the secularists predominate in the other 2 hours and 55 [sic - TftD is 2'45"] minutes, so is it really asking too much for religion to just have a small chunk of dedicated time?”

What Clifford is doing here is conflating ’secular’ with “excluding religion” rather than “not biased in favour of religion”.

The “other” 2 hours and 55 57.25 minutes actually doesn’t exclude dealing with topics related to religion (it often does – e.g. ) but Clifford wants to play the persecution card to gain sympathy for those of his cadre, or at least calibre.

What this actually means is that, in context, the time available for purely secular voices is 2 hours and 57.25 minutes: the time available for religious voices is 3 hours.

While that 2′45″ per (week)day may seem like a small amount, it does add up. But it’s the primary function of TftD that is in question, and that function is to present opinion on whatever the moral or ethical dilemma de jour is.

However, this is only ever religious opinion. Because, as we are so often told, only the religious can hold valid opinions on morality and ethics.

If I were to be charitable, this could probably be considered a case of innocently ignorant anti-non-theist bigotry. But I can’t be, because time and time and time again, non-religious voices have been deliberately excluded from TftD.

And I believe we will again. Sorry, but I don’t have enough faith in the upper echelons of the BBC to be fair and equitable to all, and not just those who claim to know things that they do not know.

I’d be more than happy to be proven wrong though.

Meanwhile, if you want to find out what TftD bobbleheads are actually saying (without all the mumbo jumbo) you can find fairly accurate translations for us unsaved heathens at Platitude of the Day.

For an example of the “wisdom” of the religious when considering moral or ethical issues, see this TftD from yesterday’s Today programme when Alan Billings held court:

Christians are taught by St Paul to rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep. Over these last few days, you would need a heart of flint not to have wept with the relatives of those waiting at RAF Lyneham to receive the bodies of their loved ones repatriated from Afghanistan.

I have been especially moved by the sadness of the parents. In the most intense way we see in them what the vocation of parenthood entails. You bring children into the world. You love and protect them. You are proud of their achievements and distressed at their setbacks. You learn about what we might call the burden of love: how vulnerable you are to what happens to them. Then your vocation changes gear. Your eighteen year lease is up, and you watch them grow up and grow away. They make their own way in the world, and you must watch now from a distance.

Down the centuries parents have often been drawn to Mary, the mother of Jesus, since her life exemplifies this pattern. She gives birth to her son. She raises him. But then, in his relatively short adult life, her vocation is one of watching – with growing anxiety. Finally she receives his body at the foot of the cross.

Some years ago I remember visiting an exhibition at the National Gallery called Seeing Salvation. The Director had brought together a wonderful collection of Christian art and artefacts from the earliest centuries to the present. I recall seeing a woman standing in front of a pieta – an image of Mary holding in her lap the dead body of her son, cradling him as she had once cradled his living body as a small child. The woman stood before the pieta, crying quietly. Was she religious? Or was she a mother who had also known in its sharpest form the burden of love?

But should the human cost of the Afghan conflict, made so visible in the raw emotions of the relatives, be made so public? During the Vietnam War, the American government sought to prevent photographs of the returning flag-draped coffins from appearing in newspapers and on television. One can understand why. All modern wars are fought in the head as much as on the battlefield and this, it was felt, would be bad for morale and so an aid to the enemy. The Taleban also understands the power of images, using them whenever they can to undermine our resolve.

Even so, we should not seek to hide the cost of this conflict. Preventing Taleban control of Afghanistan and ridding the country of the terrorist training camps that threatened us, may have made the war a sad necessity and the lesser of evils. But, the sorrow of the relatives serves to remind us that war remains an evil nonetheless.

For those of us who don’t wear JesusGogglesâ„¢, this is what he said filtered into the language of the non-theologically biased:

War is a messy business. No, honestly it is! People get killed. When we see the grieving families of dead service personnel, we immediately think of Mary, the mother of the visible bit of the Invisible Magic Friend. Even at a time when we should pause to salute the bravery of those who have given their lives, or deplore the waste of those who have died so young, or question the wisdom of a protracted campaign in a region that is notoriously difficult to control, the important thing is to be distracted by religion, the right religion, my religion. And there’s been some fantastic paintings of Mary.

As a Reverend Canon Doctor and an Anglican Priest, let me just assure you that it’s all in a good cause. That Taliban lot are a bunch of religious nutters. They think their Invisible Magic Friend has told them how to live their lives and because their Invisible Magic Friend is all good, all knowing and all powerful, everyone has to live their lives the way they tell them to. I mean, you can’t get much more loopy than that, can you? That’s what happens when people with dangerous delusions are given exclusive privileges and legitimised by the state. It’s not even the right religion. My Invisible Magic Friend assures me that their Invisible Magic Friend is just a figment of their imagination and they should stop paying any attention to him.

Actually, as an alternative, if they just recorded Platitude for the Day and broadcast that just after the existing TftD, I’d be content with that.

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Yeah, it’s from The Torygraph.

The BBC supports Islam and attacks Christianity, according to Don Maclean, the former Radio 2 religious programme presenter.

Maclean, who hosted Good Morning Sunday for 16 years, claimed that the corporation is biased against Christianity and had embarked on a movement to “secularise the country”.

Translation:

Bwaaaah boo hoo boo hoo! Nobody loves Jesus’n'Mary’n'Mo — oops, not Mo — anymore but me! Waaaah boo hoo hoo! Sob sob! etc.

If you can be arsed, the rest of it’s over there, but I wouldn’t bother if I were you.

Actually, I shouldn’t have bothered with this post. Pah, too late now—might as well press “publish”.

P.S. Why was “git” not in my computer’s dictionary? Had to remedy that pronto! Oh, look, there was a good outcome of posting this tosh.

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From the William Crawley’s blog over at the BBC:

On today’s Sunday Sequence, the CEO of Creation Ministries UK responded to claims by one of the world’s leading authorities on evolution that he was duped into appearing in an anti-Darwinian film.

Professor Peter Bowler, the author of a biography of Charles Darwin and many other books on the history of evolution, said he was interviewed for the The Voyage That Shook The World without realising that the film was being made by a Creationist [sic] group.

Professor Bowler, who has spent most of his academic career at Queen’s University, Belfast, researching Darwinism, says he is unhappy to be appearing in what he regards as an “anti-Darwinian” film which offers an historically distorted portrait of Darwin. He claims that the film’s narrative implies that Darwin’s theory led him towards racism, whereas recent historical work by James Moore and Adrian Desmond shows that Darwin’s scientific work was partly motivated by the naturalist’s passionate opposition to racism.

Professor Bowler says he, along with his colleagues Sandra Herbert and Janet Browne, only discovered that they had inadvertently contributed to a Creationist [sic] film a month before the film’s release. Peter Bowler also raised concerns about how the editing of his own interview could leave viewers with a false impression of his own perspective on Darwin.

Phil Bell, CEO of Creation Ministries UK, acknoweged that his organisation established a “front company” called Fathom Media, because they were concerned that experts such as Peter Bowler would not agree to take part in the film if they realised it was an “overtly Creationist [sic]” production. “At the end of the day,” he said, “[when] people see ‘Creationist’ [sic], instantly the shutters go up and that would have shut us off from talking to the sort of experts, such as Professor Bowler, that we wanted to get to.”

My emphasis.

One of the commentators, korotiotio, makes this point:

The producers intention for this documentary was to create a film that would be attractive to secular broadcasters and NOT an “anti-Darwin creationist polemic”, thus the production company Fathom Media was set-up to produce and market the film. Which by the way, is standard practice in television land.

While this is true, the admission from the producers as to their reasons for setting up a “front” is in spite of the fact that it’s standard practice, not germane to it.

Crawley filed this under “religion” and “ethics”. Obviously he’s using the “ethics” category as a shorthand for “gross violations of ethics”.

Read the full text of Crawley’s post over at the BBC: “Creationists defend Darwin film”

/hattip: RD.net

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