Bible Based Bull

For all the disingenous mouthing and manufactured outrage about Britain being a "Christian country" have you ever noticed how when you talk to the few people who actually identify themselves as Christians, that they often seem to know less about the Bible than you do?

Well, that's no accident!

Betty Bowers explains, here.

Meanwhile in North Devon, the Power, backed by the mighty mass of Pickles, is upping the ante and ramping the aggressive rhetoric, as the Secular Society reports; 'Ahead of last Thursday's meeting, Bideford mayor Trevor Johns said: "If the mayor wishes to have prayers, as is tradition, then the meeting should proceed with prayers. Anyone who does not want to enter the council chamber until the prayers are over is being disrespectful to the mayor." '

This may be especially worrying for residents, given that "disrespecting the Mayor" is to this day a serious crime in North Devon and punishable by a period in the stocks, said period to be determinable by His Excellency; the Mayor.

This over-zealous desire to subject every person who attends local council meetings to the dictates of the ruling clique's interpretation of Christian theology is going to have a very high cost ...

And, in an update, it seems that Minister Pickles is entering a growing religious ecstasy leading to ever more divinely inspired pronouncements. See this Bristol Traffic blogpost for Rev Pickles' latest homily for your guidance.

Dark Forces at Work in the Little White Town

Fear and dismay is tonight gripping North Devon’s famous ‘Little White Town’ as news arrives from London that the Satanic Forces of Atheism and Modernism are truly on the march across the Nation.

Any of the Godless who, by some freak, manage to insinuate themselves onto the Town Council will henceforth no longer have to bow the head to religious observance at Council meetings, but will be allowed to continue wallowing in the Slough of Ignorance, untouched by The Word of The Lord. So now, rather than being made to know their lowly status, Unbelievers will thus be given free rein to arrogantly display their pride, like the Heathen of Old.

Shame! Shame! Shame!

The hideous cackling of Lucifer’s minions must be reverberating throughout Devon and the whole of Great Britain on this Evil Day.

Post Dialectic

There is a theory that the rise in extremist religiosity and fundamentalism is actually a form of fearful defensive reaction to the secular decline in the credibility of religious ideologies and belief systems.

At a time when the Saudi monarch is coming under carefully enunciated backlash for attempting even a slight loosening of restrictions against women there, religious fundamentalists in the US are regularly snatching headlines, and some police seem to be feeling that they have a kind of license to go around laying down dress codes for American women, not unlike the religious policemen of the Middle East.

But there is cause for optimism that, in the longer run, sanity will win out and the Taliban, Dominionists and neoCons alike are just the last desperate gasp of fanatics, and that the days of enforced institutional religious enthusiasm could indeed be numbered.

“The US is increasingly portrayed as a hotbed of religious fervour. Yet in the homeland of ostentatiously religious politicians such as Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, agnostics and atheists are actually part of one of the fastest-growing demographics in the US: the godless. Far from being in thrall to its religious leaders, the US is in fact becoming a more secular country, some experts say. "It has never been better to be a free-thinker or an agnostic in America," says Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) …” Read more.