Gender-critical forces in the UK are mustering yet again and need to be opposed. Their latest anti-trans action is about the British Conversion Practices Bill.
This Conversion Practices Bill partially outlaws conversion practice for trans people and the British Government is in the call for evidence phase of that bill. Labour have already gutted it by allowing medics to do Conversion Practice, but UK gender-critical forces are trying to expand it to allow parents to do it.
I support freedom of religion. However, that right should not cover pushing those views on others, and definitely does not trump their human rights, including trans rights.
I am a reasonable man and am certain that Christian holy book the Bible is an absolute heap of disgusting, slavery condoning, male infant genital mutilation demanding, repellent, demented, vicious dark age mumbo jumbo. Given the time gap between the events recorded in the gospels and the and the estimated time they were written, the fallibility of human memory, and the potential unreliability of eyewitness testimony, the Gospels are not historically reliable with regard to the resurrection of Jesus. The gospels were written decades after the events they describe. They are reliant on the memory of unknown persons, oral traditions, and possibly other written sources that are no longer available. What’s wrong with memory? Human memory is fallible, particularly over long periods of time. It’s feasible that the authors unintentionally introduced errors while describing the resurrection event. What’s the problem with oral tradition? It was a means of transmitting information in societies that were largely illiterate. Unfortunately, as stories are passed down, the retelling of the story can include slightly different details due to memory distortion and reconstruction, and the differences can become amplified as the story is retold many times. We have watched this happen in a manner of minutes of a story being told. If you’ve ever heard of the telephone game this is a great example of this phenomenon happening. Perhaps the gospels were based on prior sources. If they are, we know nothing about these prior sources. Christians should be told quite clearly that our citizens have the legal right to criticise, lampoon, ridicule and mock god and Jesus to their heart’s content, in any way that they wish: that Christians have no special claim to protection from the rough and tumble of post-Reformation and postEnlightenment intellectual, political and social life. If they cannot live in a society in which this is the case, they should go somewhere else; they are, after all, spoilt for choice, at least in theory. Iran seems to be a very enlightened state.!
Ideally I would support freedom of religion but in reality, it’s always Religion that muscles its agenda into politics and interferes with other peoples lives.
And so, I can’t support it.
Religion is an after-school club, a weekly social event in hall somewhere - for me, it does not have place in Governing a country of many Creeds, Colours, Cultures and Sexualities.
As a scientist, I am accustomed to the idea that truth claims ought to be justified with some reasonable evidence: if one is going to claim, for instance, that a Jewish carpenter was the son of a God, or that there is a place called heaven where some ineffable, magical part of you goes when you die, then there ought to be some credible reason to believe that. And that reason ought to be more substantial than that it says so in a big book.
Religious claims all seem to short-circuit the rational process of evidence-gathering and testing and the sad thing is that many people don’t see a problem with that and even consider it a virtue. It is why I don’t just reject religion, but actively oppose it in all its forms - because it is fundamentally a poison for the mind that undermines our critical faculties.
Religious beliefs are lazy jokes with bad punchlines. Why do you have to chop off the skin at the end of your penis? Because God says so. Why should you abstain from pork, or shrimp, or mixing meat and dairy, or your science classes? Because they might taint your relationship with God. Why do you have to revere a bit of dry biscuit? Because it magically turns into a God when a priest mutters over it. Why do I have to be good? Because if you aren’t, a God will set you on fire for all eternity.
These are ridiculous propositions. The whole business of religion is clownshoes freakin’ moonshine, hallowed by nothing but unthinking tradition, fear and superstitious behaviour and an establishment of con artists who have dedicated their lives to propping up a sense of self-importance by claiming to talk to an invisible big kahuna. It’s not just fact-free, it’s all nonsense.’