The BHA reacted today to confirmation that the national radio station Classic FM stopped its promotion of Eric Idle’s show ‘Not the Messiah’ due to complaints the station received from Christian listeners.
The show, which celebrates 40 years of Monty Python, was originally promoted on air and on the station’s website and was the subject of a competition for tickets to a screening, but was dropped by the head of the station after some listeners reacted angrily to what they perceived as the promotion of a ‘militant atheist production’.
Does this not make our community look like petty, humourless, censoring….
Carmarthen’s leading comedy fundamentalist, whose star has been sadly in the descendent since he helped abolish the Blasphemy Law last year, has found something else to be offended by. Not the Messiah, a Handel’s Messiah style musical version of The Life of Brian, is being promoted by Classic FM.
The horror of this situation is passionately expressed by the director of Christian Voice in a round-robin email to supporters and on his website:
It has the song from ‘Life of Brian’ which ‘Brian’ sang while hanging from the cross, ‘Always look on the bright side of life.’ Crucifixion is not funny. It even has ‘Hail to the Shoe’ sung to the music of the Hallelujah Chorus. That isn’t funny either.
Green urges his supporters to PRAY that Classic FM pull the ads, nobody turns up at the cinemas, and that Eric Idle finds Jesus. He also wants them to write to the MD of Classic FM and let them know:
that his promotion of ‘Not the Messiah’ offends and insults you and Stephen Green. If you are a regular listener, tell him so.
Actually he says “Almighty God” instead of “Stephen Green” in the above quote. Sometimes it is really hard to tell the difference between the two. They are virtually indistinguishable.
Actually I love Monty Python, so this one’s for Christian Voice and Stephen Green:
OK, the Revelation TV debate between Rev. George Hargreaves (leader of the Christian Party) and Nick Griffin (BNP) is now on YouTube.
Here is part 1:
I nearly fell off my chair at the comments made from 1:22, in which the host mentions a website that describes George Hargreaves as the “Political poster boy for Christian Concern for our Nation”.
This is a small extract from my last post on this debate:
George Hargreaves has recently become the political poster boy of Christian Concern for our Nation….
Anyway, if you want to watch the next parts, you can find them on this link.
Nick Griffin seems to have felt the debate went rather well and was chuffed with the civility of the occasion:
The debate between British National Party leader Nick Griffin MEP and Revd George Hargreaves of the Christian Party, broadcast live on Revelation TV, was what Question Time should have been: an open exchange of views without a resident lynch mob.
Even the panel chairman on the debate, Gordon Pettie, remarked on the remarkable difference between the debate and Question Time, telling viewers that “at least we can hear what Nick Griffin has to say.”
The debate was conducted in an orderly and highly civilised fashion with the audience equally divided between BNP and Christian Party supporters.
Each side was granted equal time to present their point of view and respond to questions in a calm and rational manner.
Mr Griffin showed time and time again that the BNP was none of the things which the far leftist cranks claimed it to be, and at one stage Revd Hargreaves apologised to the BNP leader for a billboard last year which attacked the BNP in a most derogatory manner.
[.....]
“We demonstrated that the BNP is not motivated by anything else but a love of preserving Britain, and all that this entails.
“I am sure that this will resonate throughout Britain as an example of what civilised debate can be, and should be, in the Britain we all love,” Mr Griffin said.
BNP leader Nick Griffin faced protesters and heckling in New Malden last night where he claimed his anti-immigration message was endorsed by Christianity.
The far-right leader took on the leader of the Christian Party, George Hargreaves, in a live head-to-head debate on Revelation TV, a paid-for television channel based in Cocks Crescent in Blagdon Road.
Protesters heckled Mr Griffin, who is an MEP, as he entered the building and two members of the studio audience had to be thrown out for shouting.
The party leaders appeared to debate the motion ‘The election of a BNP member of Parliament would be detrimental to Christians in the UK’.
During the debate, Mr Griffin said: “To oppose mass immigration when we have an over-crowded island is not a threat to anyone, it’s just common sense.
“To pretend it’s not an issue is just unfair and it causes resentment.
“We believe that nations are ordained by God and that they will be there at the end of times, so logically from that all nations have the right to ensure they survive and are not simply swamped by an endless flood from elsewhere.”
But David Campanale, a member of the Kingston Christian People’s Alliance, said the Christian Party were unwise to participate in the debate and the TV station was wrong to give free publicity to the BNP.
Mr Campanale said: “I am not convinced that this would have done any good for black Christians in the UK.
“The BNP is an evil organisation and this does nothing but fuel their publicity.”
Gordon Petty, who moderated the debate, defended the TV station’s decision because some of the BNP’s policies aired the views of many Christians and therefore Mr Griffin deserved to be heard.
Mr Petty said: “From our perspective, we don’t agree with all the views of the BNP but we believe it is right that as Christians we do listen and make our own minds up.
“The BNP are the only party that would stop abortions in this country.
David Campanale’s comments echo advice from the Church of England sent out early in February, warning clergy not to give the British National Party a platform in church buildings, or even meet with their representatives.
Here is a snippet of their advice:
“Lately the British National Party has sought to promote itself as a guardian of ‘British Christian heritage’ against an increasing ‘islamification’ of British society and the leadership of the mainstream churches” the guidance says.
“BNP supporters and candidates claim to have established a ‘Christian Council of Britain’ which erroneously stresses the ‘godly importance of race and nation’.
“Often those elected from such parties will seek to make civic capital through contact with church leaders to increase their local standing. Church leaders need to have thought through how they will react. Local churches may now be faced with deciding how to distance themselves from groups and councillors – whose racist policies and attitudes they opposed during the elections, while maintaining pastoral engagement with those who voted for them and council officials who continue their work as public servants.”
I’m genuinely pleased to see Ekklesia swing into action, as Jonathan Bartley is skillfully adept at rebuffing the BNP, especially their claims to represent British Christianity.
More than half of adult Americans report they have had a spiritual experience that changed their lives. Now, scientists from universities like Harvard, Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins are using new technologies to analyze the brains of people who claim they have touched the spiritual — from Christians who speak in tongues to Buddhist monks to people who claim to have had near-death experiences. Hear what they have discovered in this controversial field, as the science of spirituality continues to evolve.
The owner of a private Christian TV station on Tuesday accused the Palestinian Authority of silencing the voice of the Christian minority in the Holy Land by forcing him to go off the air.
Samir Qumsieh, owner and director of Al-Mahed (Nativity) TV, which was founded in Beit Sahur, near Bethlehem, 14 years ago, said PA security officials who raided his station last week told him that the decision to close it down had been taken because he did not have a proper license.
“It’s strange that they are closing us down now after we have been broadcasting for the past 14 years,” Qumsieh said. “This is a breach of freedom of speech and an attempt to silence the media.”…
…The Christian broadcaster was one of several private radio and TV stations that were closed last week under the pretext that they had been operating without a proper license from the PA’s Ministry of Information and Ministry of Interior.
Most of the stations have been operating for over a decade.
The move drew a wave of protests by the owners and many journalists, who accused the PA government of seeking to silence the independent media in the Palestinian territories.
Some of the owners said they weren’t able to renew their licenses because of the high fees requested by the PA authorities…
The other part of the article discusses the extent to which recent corruption scandals have taken hold in the consciousness of the PA residents, despite Abbas’s attempts to silence the whistleblower. We’re once again throwing our hopes behind an entity with no ability to deliver.
The Palestinian Authority appears to have backtracked on its decision to close down 10 TV stations, including a private Christian channel.
The PA had taken the stations off the air, claiming they did not have proper licenses, but announced Wednesday that the networks would be given one month to sort out the issue.
Nevertheless, the owner of the Christian station said he would not reopen the channel until the PA apologizes…
You know it’s striking how many news items featured on PinkNews are related to Christian activity.
Anyway, they drew my attention to this:
Christians protest over religious civil partnerships
Christians have appealed to government ministers to block plans to allow gay couples the right to have civil partnership ceremonies in church.
They fear that the proposal will force church leaders to hold civil partnerships and leave them open to legal action if they do not.
The campaign is being organised by anti-gay group Christian Concern for Our Nation (CCFON), which delivered a 6,000-strong petition to Downing Street today against the plan.
It would give faiths the option of holding the ceremonies and would not be compulsory. The Quakers, Unitarian Church and Liberal Judaism have all expressed their wishes to hold the events.
However, Christian traditionalists have seized on a remark made by Stonewall chief executive Ben Summerskill in November.
He told PinkNews.co.uk: “Right now, faiths shouldn’t be forced to hold civil partnerships, although in ten or 20 years, that may change.”
I will now refer you to an astute Young Mr. Brown’s comments on this matter, which were republished on this blog:
If the Quakers and the Unitarians want to register civil partnerships in their places of worship, then that is a matter for them, and not for the state. Traditional Christians will be horrified at such things happening, but their horror should be directed not at the state for permitting these things, but at the Quakers and Unitarians for wishing to do them. If traditional Christians want freedom to proclaim that homosexual activity is wrong, and to exclude practising homosexuals from their membership, then they should be willing to allow freedom to religious bodies which think otherwise.
The UKIP candidate for Stocksbridge and Penistone, Mr Grant French, has commented as follows on your curate’s post – UKIP: Christians schools ‘must be allowed to do what it says on the tin’:
Can I point you to what will most likely be my election address? (Teach our children English, Maths and Science – not sex.) As a father of 3 girls of school age. I will not allow their morality to be influenced by this sick government. My seven-year-old will not be attending sex education.
UKIP is certainly being vocal in support of Judeo-Christian values in education for which it should be applauded. Whether it is the right party for an orthodox Christian to vote for is another matter. There are two most helpful perspectives on the UKIP question in the letters section of April’s Evangelicals Now.
Mr Fred Lush of Bideford, Devon, supports UKIP and argues that a vote for a minor party is not a wasted vote:
I believe that the idea of a ‘wasted vote’ is misleading, and encouraged by the major parties to enhance their share of votes.
If it is believed that votes for minor parties are wasted we shall at some time have an exclusive two party system.
Mr Graeme Kemp of Wellington, Shropshire, left UKIP in the late 1990s
as the party drifted further to the right. And, indeed, UKIP has increasingly adopted a much tougher stance on immigration. UKIP is obsessed with defending ‘Britishness’.
Additionally, the party oddly blames the welfare state for educational failure, crime and family breakdown. A lot of people hit by the ‘credit crunch’ and unemployed would disagree with that kind of sentiment.
He concludes:
If we are to take the Bible seriously on social justice issues, and concern for the poor, then voting for fringe right-wing parties is not really an option for Christians, I believe.
It is vitally important that Christians engage with this coming election and do not capitulate to the ‘whatever’ society, the politics of ‘the shrug’, as Ann Widdecombe terms it. We are facing a squeeze on our Christian liberties and this is likely to get worse whether the Conservatives or Labour get to power and even worse if we have a hung Parliament with politically-correct Liberal Democrats holding the balance.
Christ’s servants must be seen to be concerned for the welfare of the earthly city in which we spend our time of exile, more concerned though we should be with our heavenly home. The Apostle Paul expresses our Christian hope so wonderfully in Philippians 3v20-21:
But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Saviour from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body (NIV).
“Tiger Woods should spare us sanctimonious talk about religion” is the headline of a Telegraph article written by Oliver Brown and as you can imagine he is not impressed with Tiger’s recent TV confessionals:
[.....]
But his daftest answer came to the first question. How did Woods allow his life to spin out of control? “I quit meditating… I quit being a Buddhist.”
Oh, please. Baring your soul to the nation is all very brave, but dignifying your dalliances as some failure of religious conviction most emphatically is not. True, we learned from Woods’s aching apology a month ago that his Thai mother, Tilda, had imparted to him the tenets of the Buddhist faith, but never in any interview given before this scandal broke had he invoked them.
It sounded like a retrospective excuse of pure convenience, as became apparent moments later. “You strip away the denial, the rationalisation, and you come to the truth,” Woods told Tilghman. Nice line, only a little too machine-tooled by his PR people. He expressed the exact same sentiment, with the exact same wording, over on ESPN.
Quite coincidentally I came across an interesting article which poses the question of the effectiveness of celebs appealing to religion when they’re in a spot of bovver:
Honestly, I have no idea if these appeals are effective. And anyone who says they do know—well, I want to see the study supporting the claim.
From a human perspective, it makes sense to invoke one’s religion in public apologies involving violations of morality. The apology is an act of atonement, and those times require the faithful to realign with their moral principles. Often, and this cuts across cultures, those principles are codified by religious teachings.
While invoking religion in an apology makes sense from an anthropological perspective, it’s also good public relations practice. People of faith understand an appeal to faith, so you speak in terms your audience understands. Whether the public ultimately accepts this apology will depend on whether the “sinner” has, in fact, repented.
Tiger Woods’ and Mark Sanford’s behaviors in the future are all that matter now. And even if they do adjust their behaviors, rescuing their reputations will still take years.
To steal a line from a well-known transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson: “What you do speaks so loudly, I cannot hear what you say.”
Bill Sledzik is a professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Kent State University where he teaches courses in public relations, writing, and ethics.
Loyal Blairite Ruth Taylor has written an apologetic for Tony’s “Faith Foundation” in the New Humanist.
For some insightful reactions on this from a Humanist perspective, I would urge you to pop over to Heresy Corner. The Church Mouse has also offered his thoughts on the matter.
I haven’t really got anything additional to add, except to highlight a press release from the BNP a few days ago:
Tony Blair Draws Profits from His Illegal War in Iraq
Tony Blair has earned “hundreds of thousands of pounds” from a lucrative contract with oil company UI Energy, one of the biggest investors in post-war Iraq’s oilfields. Details of Mr Blair’s dealings have emerged after his frantic attempts to keep them secret ended after they were publishedby the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (ACBA).
I will say that I don’t recall seeing this information anywhere else, however, if it is true then it makes me feel heartily sick for many reasons, and not least because of this:
In the seven years since the Iraq War was launched, 2,000 Christians have been murdered and 600,000 have fled Iraq, according to Fides, the news agency of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples. 44% of Iraqi refugees are Christians, and many of the 600,000 Christians who remain are internally displaced persons who have had to flee their homes.
To find out more on the heart rending plight of both Jews and Christians in Iraq currently:
You might also want to check out this interesting development in the EU Observer:
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS – A Brussels reporter attempted to place Tony Blair under a citizen’s arrest on Monday (22 March) for his role in the invasion of Iraq, during a visit by the former UK prime minister to the European Parliament for a hearing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
On the seventh anniversary of the invasion almost to the day, late afternoon, David Cronin, an Irish journalist with the Inter Press Service news agency and a regular writer on European Union affairs for The Guardian, the British centre-left daily, approached Mr Blair, as he was due to discuss with MEPs his current work as a Middle East special envoy.
Placing his hand on the former prime minister’s arm, Mr Cronin said: “Mr Blair, this is a citizens’ arrest.”
The ex-Labour leader, in the parliament to speak as the special representative of the Quartet – the EU, US, Russia and the UN – momentarily flinched, but the 38-year-old reporter was quickly pushed away by a bodyguard.
“You are guilty of war crimes,” he said, intending to invite Mr Blair to accompany him to the nearest police station to be charged with committing a “a war of aggression” – a military conflict waged without the justification of self-defense – in breach of customary international law, specifically the Nuremberg Principles under the rubric of the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court, the legal body that exercises jurisdiction over the crime of aggression.
