The BBC has done good job of censoring that old Christmas favourite, Fairytale of New York. Tipped to make Christmas number one this year, the word "faggot" is being bleeped out on radio for the first time in the song's 20-year history.
I wonder what the late Kirsty MacColl would think of this very specific censorship, considering that the remainder of the potentially offensive words in the verse in question have been left perfectly audible:
You're a bum
You're a punk
You're an old slut on junk
Lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed
You scumbag, you maggot
You cheap lousy f______
Happy Christmas your arse
I pray God it's our last
Of all the content to filter.
One El Reg reader notes:
It's just another step along the same slippery road to PC madness that insisted on changing the well known nursery rhyme "baa baa black sheep" to "baa baa rainbow sheep".
And he goes on:
I once read an article that said all this PC Gone Mad to avoid offending anyone of any race, religion or gender is now becoming Offensive to the indiginous native population as our 'common use' language has to be modified in light of the increasing number of non-indigenous arrivals that CHOOSE to come here then OBJECT to what they find here and INSIST that *WE* change to accommodate them.
*sigh*
It should be fairly clear by now that I'm not religious at all in the traditional sense. I don't think that the Bible was written through any supreme being; I think that it was a piece of fiction, a way for primitive humans to explain the things about life that they couldn't otherwise comprehend.
That doesn't mean, however, that they couldn't have been clever and/or mystical with the fiction. Going with the proposed theory that Jesus is the Sun, then certainly a lot of intelligence was involved in creating such a filled-out and detailed allegorical story.
Hence some of these "prophetic co-incidences" that you see in the Bible can be pretty interesting and I'm not about to debunk the lot just because I don't believe in the Christian deity per se.
Take yesterday and today, for example. Mars, Earth, Mercury, Jupiter, the Sun and the Galactic Centre are aligned, there's a Full Moon (conjunct Mars), and a Venus-square -Neptune arrangement. Also, the Pluto/Sun conjunction appears exactly on the Winter Solstice. A very interesting galactic alignment event.
And there's an interesting biblical/astrological similarity to go with it.
In Genesis 1, the Bible talks about the stars being for "signs" and seasons and Revelations 12 in particular makes the signs and times clear.
There it talks about a woman being clothed in the sun, hiding for 3.5 years then bringing forth a "man-child". On 6th June 2004 Venus transited the Sun. 3.5 years later, in December of 2007, is when "THE cross" in our solar system is formed.
You have to admit, that's pretty cool. I got it from an article which went on about some otherwise dubious conspiracy theories:
"Washington DC is a SOLAR CALENDAR";
"Every 13 Baktuns, we on earth receive a new SUN";
"The fountain is the eye of the pyramid, surrounded by the Omega, meaning the end. In other words, the end of this solar cycle is knocking on our door. The fountain is 2007. And there is a particular timeframe in mind… ";
"Let's put it another way. The messiah is about to return, but not as a man in a brown robe… The writing of the gospels about Jesus was a personified story about the SUN… ";
"Covenant Man 231 … 1.776 to Center of Fountain is 2.31 kilometers, representing 231 years. 1776+231 is 2007… ";
"December on the Winter Solstice (in 2007) there will be a Grand Conjunction. This conjunction forms a cross, with the base at the Galactic center. It is my belief that this is when the sun dies (and will be reborn). It is what the Mayans, Egyptians and our Founding Fathers were trying to tell us. It is why over the past few years our weather has been going downhill and the people in government have been screaming about global warming.";
"What is not shown is Pluto (which would be to Jupiter's right) Saturn, which follows down from Venus, and Uranus and Neptune. Saturn and Neptune form the cross's t-member. It is a 23/12 configuration. There will be a full moon on Dec. 23rd, 2007—right under Venus (literally, a woman with 12 stars around her head and the moon at her feet)".
All this is, of course, little more than subconscious attempts to 'pass the buck' on man's responsibility to this Earth onto uncontrollable astral phenomenon.
But it's still neat, and when you can look at the "predictions" and see patterns, despite the good mathematical probability of being able to see a pattern in anything after the fact (i.e. shoehorning), there's some fun to be had.
That said, there is some damning evidence for the 21st December 2012 being the end of the world…
As the end of the year approaches, with offices closed for the holidays, decorations up, cruises canceled and early bargains coming online, there are all sorts of interesting things to talk about.
Travelscope
Firstly, the canceled cruises. Gloucester-based Travelscope went into administration this week, instantly wiping out the Christmas break plans of something like 10,000 people.
One disappointed ex-customer said, "due to the naivety of bosses they have single-handedly canceled Christmas this year. They shouldn't be able to get away with it."
Understandable anger aside, it's not quite that simple: apparently the company is folding due to litigation over a canceled cruise. Essentially, one pissed off ex-customer has gotten greedy and is now ruining the season for tens of thousands of others.
And that's not even mentioning almost three hundred people who work at Travelscope. All of them will be laid off and, well, I strongly suspect there's not much "getting away with it" going on within the management ranks.
It all comes back to religion in the end
Meanwhile, the Archbishop of Wales, has described a rise in "atheistic fundamentalism" as one of the greatest problems facing the world.
He said it led to situations such as councils calling Christmas "Winterval", schools "refusing" (aka deciding) to put on nativity plays and crosses removed from hospital chapels.
For a start, "Winterval" is not a new name for Christmas: it is a representative word which collectively describes all festivities taking place around the end of the year (the winter in the Northern Hemisphere), in an attempt to be fully inclusive of the majority of world cultures. It's not even an attempt to "avoid talking about Christmas": the new holiday explicitly includes Christmas along with everything else.
That a leading Christian personality would make such a blunder to imply a special link between Winterval and Christmas itself only goes to demonstrate how Christians believe they have the sole right to dominate end-of-year festivities. And they wonder where this "fundamentalism" comes from.
The Archbishop, named Dr Barry Morgan in real life, does have a few good points: "Any kind of fundamentalism, be it Biblical, atheistic or Islamic, is dangerous."
Then he went back to the rhetoric, saying that it was advocated that religion in general and Christianity in particular have no substance, and that some view the faith as "superstitious nonsense". Yep. So? Some — in fact, most — Christians view lack of faith as a cardinal sin, and as a state of mind which is unhealthy, unclean and unnatural.
As for "airlines refusing staff the freedom to wear a cross round their necks", I still don't see why religion should be classed as a somehow "special" way of life. If I choose to be a goth, should I have a media-given right to turn up to work out of uniform, dressed in all black with dark makeup all over my face? No.
"God is not exclusive, he is on the side of the whole of humanity with all its variety." (But you're going to Hell if you do not believe, because you're wrong and need help.)
"All of this is what I would call the new 'fundamentalism' of our age. It allows no room for disagreement, for doubt, for debate, for discussion."
If Dr Morgan really thinks that disagreement, doubt, debate and discussion are being pushed out of society because of "atheistic fundamentalism", I'd love to know what he thinks this is.
On to leaders
What else? Ah.. Tony Blair. Heh.
There's a whole bunch of contradiction over Tony Blair's conversion to Catholisicm this week. Some people are saying he did well to wait until he left the prime ministerial office. Others are saying he should have spoken up either before or during his term.
Then some people say that faith and religion should have no part in the day-to-day running of a government. I believe that, but it leads to other issues in that, as PM, he was responsible for appointing bishops in the Anglican church. So he appeared to have a bit of a conflict of interest on all sides, really.
Bootnote
All very interesting. But right now there are just three days left before the big day, so I'm going to go and plan what I will buy when the winter sales start early. I think I'm going for a S5IS.
Happy holidays!
The day after I accused religious authorities of attempting to unfairly stifle the promotion of atheism, Mark Pritchard (Conservative MP for The Wrekin, Shropshire) has called a Westminster debate on "Christianophobia", claiming that attempts to move Christian traditions to the margins of British life have "gone far enough".
Pritchard said "Christianophobia of the politically correct brigade" also ran the risk of Christianity being hijacked by extremist parties. He said he did not want to criticise people of other faiths, but wanted to "protect the Christian tradition".
He added: "Some people seem to want to forget the Christian tradition going back to the first century and its contribution to arts, culture and science.
"It's gone far enough. If there are those who want to see the Christian church reduced to the margins in this nation they should have the courage to say so, rather than using the rights of other religions as an excuse."
He cited examples such as recent findings suggesting that four fifths of schools were not staging Nativity plays this year.
In principle I agree that there may be a growing issue with Britain's traditions and ways of life in general being sidelined by political correctness gone mad, and by the "we must not offend" mantra of the current administration.
However in this specific case, I agree more with Keith Porteous Wood, executive director of the National Secular Society, who believes the whole thing to be a "waste of precious parliamentary time" when there are more important issues to be raised in Government.
"Christians have absolutely nothing to complain about in this country," he said before citing the fact that 26 bishops sit in the House of Lords and that England has an established church.
"The head of state is a Christian, the prime minister is a Christian and almost all the cabinet are self-identified Christians. How on earth can anyone imagine that Christians are disadvantaged or pushed to the margins?
"Christians are not being pushed out of public life, if anything they are over-represented."
It's just one more of those political and media debates over religion and tradition which do not show any sign of diminishing.
I've been reminded once again why I despise Microsoft's views on how to create software. Basically put, they like to make things pretty and simple to accommodate the average Joe who's never heard of "kernels", "proxies" or "security".
Tonight my Windows Live Messenger client has been playing up horrendously (and it's not the first time, either). In fact, for the last few days I've been getting error messages progressively more frequently, but tonight it's reached the point where I literally cannot send any messages without being accosted with "this message could not be delivered to all recipients".
The message could not be delivered to all recipients?
How deliciously vague that is. Why couldn't it be delivered? Was there a TCP fault? Did the message get lost in the network somewhere? Did it bounce from the client with an error? Was it filtered by MSN's central server for some arcane reason?
None of this potentially useful debugging information is made available and as such, like with many Messenger problems, the mystery goes unsolved even when it occurs to thousands of people.
See, Microsoft wouldn't want Joe to know that a proxy had failed to re-transmit the message. Joe wouldn't care. But I'm sure when Joe calls his geeky friend Bert over to fix his Messenger client and Bert has no clue what's going on either, Joe will care. Joe will care a lot.
Especially in the week that interim project reports are due.
Allow me to introduce "The Golden Compass", an upcoming fantasy film based on Philip Pullman's "Northern Lights".
It's about a little orphan girl called Lyra living in a fictional universe which a dictatorship, the Magisterium, threatens to dominate. She gets taken on an adventure from Oxford to the Arctic, and eventually to the edge of another Universe just to battle evil. (Just think of the frequent flyer points up for grabs on that one…)
And as with all vaguely interesting, magical, potentially semi-decent fantasy films these days the religious zealots are out to get it. "The DaVinci Code" got it, "Harry Potter" had it over and over again (despite Daniel Radcliffe being under-age at the time), "Dogma" had it, "Priest" had it, "Constantine" had it, etc etc etc… [1].
This time it's about the depiction of Northern Lights' "The Church" — renamed "Magisterium" for the film in an unsuccessful attempt to avoid just this sort of negative attention — as an overall evil group of sadists bent on universal domination.
Conservative Roman Catholics and evangelicals have already started condemning the film, saying it will "hook children into Pullman's books and a dark, individualistic world where all religion is evil." [2] Every clergy person is evil, and their daemons typically take the form of snakes or frogs. Pullman's afterlife consists of bodies breaking into particles and being recycled into the material world.
Analysis
Okay, so telling everyone that religion is evil is pretty strong stuff. In a film I personally don't see the issue but I can understand where these people are coming from.
It's when they start to get mad over stuff they have no right to be mad about that I start to get, well, mad. The New York-based "Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights" is boycotting the film, calling it "selling atheism to kids".
As if the Church and pretty much all denominations thereof aren't guilty of "selling religion to kids" on a daily basis. I can't see how teaching the opposite is any different morally, ethically or legally, no matter what your personal philosophy.
If anything, I'm glad that finally someone — Pullman — is taking the bold step of actually telling children that it's okay not to be religious. You don't have to hide in the shadows or lurk in darkness if you dare defy the whims of the faithful, or swoop around the clutches of the zealots.
Pullman himself intended this when he wrote the book and, in fact, the entire trilogy of which it composed one book: "His Dark Materials".
In response to complaints over a comment made by a nun in one of the later books ("the Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that's all"), Pullman himself admitted, "I'm trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief." No real surprise there, given that he's a member of Britain's National Secular Society.
And why not?
Although on first glance it may seem like something of a contrary, indignant thing to do, is it really any different from the millions and millions of religious followers worldwide who openly admit that their primary goal in life is to convert others: to undermine the basis of agnostic or atheist belief.
Is it really any different? Sometimes it seems that religious folk consider themselves gifted with the divine right to impose over the philosophies of others and that the opposite is not true. And how can it be? How can us secular folk be gifted with a divine right to do anything when we don't believe in divinity? That doesn't really seem fair, does it?
Bootnote
At least the whole debate is bringing significant attention to the movie. After all, there is no such thing as bad publicity. And if a professor of religion at Boston University (Donna Freitas) feels able to call the books a "theological masterpiece" then they must be good.
I suppose I'd better actually go read them now.
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[1] Controversy Movies
[2] Is 'Golden Compass' 'selling atheism to kids'? – CNN.com
