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.

Axiom of Choice

“The art of remembering is the art of thinking; … when we wish to fix a new thing in either our own mind or a pupil’s, our conscious effort should not be so much to impress and retain it as to connect it with something already there. The connecting is the thinking; and, if we attend clearly to the connection, the connected thing will certainly be likely to remain within recall.”

William James, quoted by Memrise. 

In the Midst of Death we are in Love

In this new year we (me and partner) began watching the whole box set DVD of that ridiculously sublime and satirical mythopoeia; Lexx. By early February we'd drunk in every bit. Now we've started from the very beginning again. So much has happened in between that it's kind of inspiring brain re-wirement.

Then discovering that one of the genii of Lexx lost his life on Christmas Eve 2011, aged 49 was brutal.

Martin Hellmich has created a beautiful video memorial tribute to Lex Gigeroff, here.

By the Light of the Tree

All Saints Eggesford

Passing on a sunny day through this Devonish scattered hamlet again visited the church of Chichester, Newton, Fellowes and Portsmouth Earls' monument.

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.

Common Good Land

Andy Wightman reports today on what will hopefully be a game-changer in the saga of Aberdeen's Union Terrace Gardens, where the city council is trying its hardest to turn a venerable green space; the city's green heart and lungs, into another dull modernist blank - or as they are so pleased to call it, a "granite web" - against the stated wishes of a majority of Aberdonians.

The Friends of Union Terrace Gardens explains that: "Aberdeen City Council and an un-elected quango, ACSEF, want to pass ownership of the gardens to a private company and replace them with a large concrete structure. "

"ACSEF alone has cost over half a million pounds of public money so far, despite claiming to be funded by both the public and private sector."

But these expensively mis-laid plans may now crumble as they run smack bang into a legal obstacle which they cannot trample rough-shod. As the report (PDF) makes clear:

"If any part of Union Terrace Gardens ceases to be a recreational park dedicated to public use and/or it is disposed of by way of a lease or sale to a third party, then, as part of the City’s common good, Aberdeen City Council will require the consent of the courts. This will involve the Council raising a petition in either the Sheriff Court or the Court of Session. In the paper presented to the Council in October 2010, a timetable is presented for the development of the City Garden Project. Nowhere in this timetable is there provision for presentation of a petition to the courts for approval to dispose of common good land. This may be because the Council do not consider this necessary or because they are, as yet, unaware of the necessity of doing so ..."

Whoops!

NB., as clarified to the Scottish Parliament on 17 November 2006, "The Common Good originated as revenues from properties belonging to the early Burghs of Scotland. The Common Good, as these revenues were then termed, is of great antiquity and there is no equivalent in English local government although the term remains current in Scotland. Essentially, the Common Good denoted all property of a Burgh not acquired under statutory powers or held under special trusts."