eChurch Blog

This from the National Secular Society:

The High Court today ruled that “The saying of prayers as part of the formal meeting of a Council is not lawful under s111 of the Local Government Act 1972, and there is no statutory power permitting the practice to continue”. The judgement follows a Judicial Review initiated by the National Secular Society.

The judgement follows a Judicial Review initiated by the National Secular Society to challenge the practice of prayers as part of the formal business of council meetings in Bideford Town Council (Devon).

UPDATE: Here’s more from the BBC

UPDATE II: Cranmer has now blogged on this.

UPDATE III: Gregg has now blogged on this (Hard hitting with some swearing)

UPDATE IV: Cranmer has further blogged on this.

UPDATE V: The Telegraph have a voting poll on this issue; why not hop over and cast your vote. It’ll be interesting to view the outcome. At the moment, the results are surprising in a nice way

UPDATE VI: GodandPolitics and Roger Pearse have blogged and Premier have reported on this.

UPDATE VII: Heresy Corner declares this a pyrrhic victory for the NSS

UPDATE: VIII: Ekklesia have a different take on today’s ruling. And here is an Ekklesia media statement.

A few links I found interesting for one reason or another:

Catholic Boy Richard – “Getting It Straight” on Same-Gender Attraction…And Rick Santorum

A Grain of Sand – Fairness

Liberal Conspiracy – Why was my friend jailed over botched attempt to end his own life?

Dreaming Beneath the Spires – Successful Christians; Hidden Christians

Get Religion – Last temptation of Castro

Psych Central – Are You In Recovery But Not Really Recovering?

The first by the Gay community.

The second from the Humanist camp.

Dr Jim West alerts us to an exciting new project connected with the University of Sheffield, called: Religion and the Media.

Here’s what they say about the project themselves:

This new blog is going to be dedicated to all things media and religion, usually with some connection to issues relating to media freedom, linked as it is with the Centre for Freedom of Media at the University of Sheffield. In addition to news and updates, there will be regular analysis from a variety of people both linked to the Centre in someway and guest bloggers. For (marginally) more detail see the About page.

And this from their “About” page:

This blog is part of the Centre for Freedom of the Media (University of Sheffield) which reflects a developing research collaboration between Jackie Harrison and James Crossley. The blog will be dedicated to updates, news and analysis of a wide range of issues relating to religion and the media.

I’m thrilled so see a new project of this ilk, as the interplay between religion and media is an ongoing source of frustration interest. I’m often surprised anew at the lack of religious knowledge some journalists and mainstream media platforms exhibit, and that’s not to mention the sometimes glaring bias.

There is only one other website dedicated to religion in the media that I know of, and that is the excellent GetReligion blog, which specialises in highlighting errors, generalisations, and lack of context and balance when reporting on religion. We really do need more resources in this important area.

So, I shall be watching this new project with interest and am with Dr West in looking forward to what they can offer as a corrective to poor religious reporting.

Hence, the secular theocracy exalts a sovereign and powerful state that pervades all of life and compels obedience not just to its mandates but to the secular nationalism of the Zeitgeist itself, for which the populace is forced to conform to and fund.

SOURCE

Interesting development. I wonder if we’ll eventually see the day when Christians are prosecuted under these laws. For a little background on this law, click here.

Three Muslim men have been found guilty of stirring up hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation after distributing a leaflet that said Islam called for anyone caught committing homosexuality to be executed.

Ihjaz Ali, Kabir Ahmed and Razwan Javed handed out the pamphlet, called The Death Penalty?, which showed an image of a mannequin hanging from a noose and quoted Islamic texts that said capital punishment was the only way to rid society of homosexuality.

Today at Derby Crown Court they were convicted by a jury of distributing threatening written material intending to stir up hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation in the first prosecution of its kind since legislation came into force in March 2010.

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To some of us it will come as no surprise that this incident happened at the University of London:

‘Five minutes before the talk was due to start a man burst into the room holding a camera phone and for some seconds stood filming the faces of all those in the room. He shouted ‘listen up all of you, I am recording this, I have your faces on film now, and I know where some of you live’, at that moment he aggressively pushed the phone in someone’s face and then said ‘and if I hear that anything is said against the holy Prophet Mohammed, I will hunt you down.’ He then left the room.

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A molecular biologist friend of mine in Cambridge once told me that the saddest aspect of the work of people like Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins was the way they identified evolution with atheist materialism.

The result, among those Christians, Muslims and others who had little understanding of science, was inevitable: reject Darwinian evolution altogether.

SOURCE

I wanted to draw your attention to a fab article on “Secular Theocracy”, which I think is well worth your time reading in its entirety:

We live in an increasingly secularized world of massive and pervasive nation states in which traditional religion, especially Christianity, is ruled unwelcome and even a real danger on the basis of a purported history of intolerance and “religious violence.” This is found in most all “public” domains, including the institutions of education, business, government, welfare, transportation, parks and recreation, science, art, foreign affairs, economics, entertainment, and the media. A secularized public square policed by government is viewed as providing a neutral, rational, free, and safe domain that keeps the “irrational” forces of religion from creating conflict and darkness. And we are told that real progress requires expanding this domain by pushing religion ever backward into remote corners of society where it has little or no influence. In short, modern America has become a secular theocracy with a civic religion of national politics (nationalism) occupying the public realm in which government has replaced God.

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Finally, Chris Cotter – who I introduced here – has put me out of my misery and revealed his top secret new project, which sounds really exciting.

I’ll hand over to Chris at this point to furnish us with more details:

The Religious Studies Project  (RSP) is a website and podcasting project launched in January 2012, founded by David G. Robertson and Christopher R. Cotter, and presented in association with the British Association for the Study of Religions.  It features a weekly audio interview (of around 30 minutes) with leading scholars of Religious Studies (RS) and related fields, which is available through the website, iTunes and other portals. In addition to the podcasts, the website also features weekly articles from postgraduate students and other scholars of religion on the themes of the interview that week, in addition to other useful resources and articles relevant to teachers and students of religion in the modern world.

The RSP has been launched to help disseminate contemporary issues in RS to a wider audience and provide a resource for undergraduate students of RS, their teachers, and interested members of the public. It aims to provide engaging, concise and reliable accounts of the most important concepts, traditions, scholars and methodologies in the contemporary study of religion, without pushing a religious or nonreligious agenda or resorting to presenting “fact files” about “World Religions”.

Have you ever wondered how you can use a brain scanner to study religion? Or what an anthropologist does? Is Jedism a religion? What exactly is the secularisation thesis? These are just a few questions we address in the first few episodes. Our first podcast features Professor Emeritus James Cox (University of Edinburgh) speaking to David about the phenomenology of religion. You can find the podcast and accompanying notes here, or alternatively subscribe on iTunes.

In the meantime, please have a look around the site, follow us on Twitter, “Like” us on Facebook, rate us on iTunes, tell all your friends about us… and let us know what you think!