As defenders of religious freedom in the US rail against the Obamacare contraception mandate, today brought another reminder that the campaign by secular extremists to drive religion from public life isn’t confined to the US.
A judge ruled that a town council in Devon, in south-west England, acted unlawfully by beginning its meetings with a prayer, which it had been doing without controversy for around 400 years. The court case was brought by the National Secular Society after an atheist former councillor, Clive Bone, complained. Not surprisingly, Bone represented the Liberal Democrats, who are the Conservative’s coalition partners in the national government and who, in spite of their name, are liberal only when it comes to matters of crime and punishment.
The court ruling wasn’t quite the victory militant atheists are claiming, however. The judge did not find that the saying of prayers breached the human rights of atheists, as the NSS had claimed. Instead he found against the council under legislation relating to the conduct of council meetings; those laws could shortly be scrapped as part of reforms to local government, allowing prayers to resume, and presumably leading to a new legal challenge.
But this case wasn’t about the ‘rights’ of atheists, or the wounded feelings of Bone, who of course wasn’t compelled to join in the pre-meeting prayers. While Bone was probably motivated in part by good old-fashioned British bloody-mindedness, as in the US, the aim of the liberal-left militant atheist movement is to destroy religion as a source of moral authority, clearing the field for the state, when under the control of enlightened liberals, to impose its values on society.
At least in the US there’s a powerful coalition fighting to defend religious liberty. Here we have the Church of England, whose leaders are either too busy engaging in liberal activism or too lacking in self-belief to defend religion, and which is headed by a leftist crank who’s called for elements of sharia to be incorporated into the law of the land, attacked the free market and sided with anti-capitalist mobs.
Groups such as the National Secular Society hardly need to trouble themselves with court cases to banish religion from public life. They could just sit back and let the CofE do the job for them.
I’m not sure how the chips have fallen in the UK, but I can say that on this side of the Atlantic this is largely along party lines. When someone who is a power in the Democratic party like Chuck Shumer can openly imply that devout Catholics have no business sitting as judges you can see where things stand.
The single issue that was most common amongst white Obama voters in 2008 was a deep contempt and hatred and bigotry for all but the most exsanguinated and emasculated forms of Christianity. More than collectivism, more than political correctness, more than cultural Marxism, more than a hatred of George Bush. This is the single most common characteristic of the users of state funded radio/television here (NPR/PBS). It is endemic in the public education system (populated almost entirely by far left Democrats). Even in the private media the bulk of the players possess this attitude.
If this is the case in the UK as well, times really are tough.
If my name was Clive Bone I’d have the courts work on that first. Dawkins Clone has a bit of a ring.
I was what I call a “Pink Diaper Baby,” to distinguish me from the “Red Diaper” variety. Eventually I realized how dreary militant atheism was. I’m now an agnostic (yes, there is a difference), and realize that there never has been a purely secular society with a solid moral foundation. One can be non-religious and have a strong moral core, but only because the foundation was laid by those with religious convictions.
Let us remember, the Church of England was itself created because Henry VIII wanted a more “liberal” divorce/annulment policy than the Roman Catholic Church would permit.
So lefty theology is pretty much baked into the CofE.
“Groups such as the National Secular Society hardly need to trouble themselves with court cases to banish religion from public life. They could just sit back and let the CofE do the job for them.”
They smell blood I suppose, it draws them in.
Here in the US, everyone in entertainment, education and most of the press are opposed to religion in the public square, or at least the Christian variety. All others are welcome though. And now we even have the military leadership tipping the balance by accommodating wiccan services, supporting the repeal of the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy, and removing the word “God” from unit patches.