Been a while since I worked
on a consistent weekly segment for this blog, so I thought it was
high time I got something started up again.
My idea for the 'Sunday News
Round-Up' is for it to pretty much do what it says on the tin: every
Sunday I'll post links to some news articles relevant to topics this
blog covers, along with a bit of analysis and discussion from me.
I'll break them down by topic, articles relating to atheism and
religion in one, articles relating to scepticism in the other.
Right then, let's get this
show on the road.
THIS WEEK IN
ATHEISM AND RELIGION...
Shirley Chaplin, Gary McFarlane and Lillian Ladele are back in the news this week,
as they're appealing the decision made by the European Court earlier
this year. You might recall these three as the guys who complained
that their employers were discriminating against them on religious
grounds; Mrs Chaplin is a nurse forbidden to wear a cross at work,
whilst Mr McFarlane and Miss Ladele are a relationship and marriage
counsellor respectively who refused to work with homosexual couples.
The former lost his job over it, whilst the latter is claiming that
her employers making her work with gay couples would be
discrimination.
All the rulings against them
were held up in the European Court of Appeals, but now they're back
decrying unfair treatment, double-standards and further
discrimination against Christians. I do feel a bit sorry for Mrs
Chaplin, I must admit; she had been wearing her cross (not exactly a
big deal) for thirty years when she was asked to remove it on health
and safety grounds, and she did actually offer to modify it so it did not only for this to be refused.
The other two I have no sympathy for, however. We're reaching the
stage were gay couples are finally starting to gain the right
straight couples have solely enjoyed for far too long, and these kind
of people can scream that they're not homophobes until Hell freezes
over: if you are refusing to work with such couples based solely on
their being gay, that's actual discrimination based upon sexual
orientation.
---
A health and physical education teacher in Columbus, Ohio has been fired after the principal learned she was gay.
Would it surprise you overly to learn that this school is Catholic?
Yeah, me neither.
Carla Hale, who had worked
at Bishop Watterson High School for nineteen years, had her post
terminated because her homosexuality is “a violation of moral law”.
No, seriously. That's apparently their reasoning for this bullshit
move. I never cease to be astounded by the fact that these people
still think they can get away with this sort of thing still. Either
way, a shitstorm is brewing, the school is under heavy scrutiny and
Hale, who very kindly says that all she wants is her job back, is
nonetheless pursuing legal action against the school for it's blatant
discrimination against her. She's going to win, there's no doubt
about it; the school diocese has no justification for the stunt it's
pulled.
---
And finally for this section
some news closer to home for me: a poll in Scotland by the Sunday
Times and Real Radio Scotland shows a sizeable decrease in the number of people saying they belong to the Christian faith.
This stands in stark contrast to an earlier poll in 2001, which had
65% of respondents saying they were Christian; in this new poll it's
dropped to 55%, and those stating that they have no belief in god has
risen from just 28% to 39%. Good news all round, by my standards. The
National Secular Society, whose analysis of these numbers I'm
politely pinching, points out that many people tend to overstate
their religious tendencies in these polls, so for all we know the
changes might be even larger.
The
poll results are available online; you can check them out here.
THIS
WEEK IN SCEPTICISM...
Anyone
remember Andrew Wakefield? The former doctor who kicked off the whole
MMR vaccine controversy with his fraudulent 1998 paper that linked
the vaccine to autism? Who was using his paper to try and trick the
government into using a medical test he had the patent for?
Yeah,
well the asshole's back in the news again this week.
In the
wake of the reports about Measles spreading in south Wales this
month, Wakefield is using this outbreak as an excuse to remind us all
that he sadly hasn't stopped breathing and to blame the British government for the whole thing.
Yup, the man partly responsible for the deaths of untold numbers of infants
because he scared their parents away from vaccines is once again
trying to redirect the blame on everyone but himself. Professor
Andrew Finn, a specialist in childhood vaccines and an actually
credible source of information on these matters, has denounced
Wakefield's statements as, and I do quote, “balderdash”:
“His
proposal for single vaccines was not based on any observations in his
published paper. It came straight out of his head. There has never
been any evidence it would have made any difference.”
Wakefield
has been struck from the medical record and has fled to the USA,
where he continues to perpetrate his particularly noxious brand of
bullshit.
---
If
you follow vjack's blog Atheist Revolution, you might remember a post
about how you should really reconsider using the Huffington Post as a reliable source of information.
Well, please allow me to further stress this point by looking at
another article in which HuffPo gives credence to pseudoscience and
nonsense over critical thinking.
Specifically this one,
in which it gives a soapbox to a group led by New Age woo-peddlar
Deepak Chopra who are complaining about TEDx removing
pseudoscientific videos from its blog.
Please
note that TEDx is not the actual Technology, Entertainment and Design
conference; parapsychologists like Rupert Sheldrake, the removal of
whose talk Chopra and his friends are protesting, would never manage
to get a platform there, due to them actually having standards. TEDx
conferences are third-party conferences that license the TED brand in
order to gain more attention, but they often don't have the standard
of entry their parent group does. Nonetheless, the misuse of the
brand can have negative effects on the parent company, and nothing
damages ones credibility as a solid source for science than allowing
a herd of quantum woo-types to use your name to add much-needed
credibility to their ideas.
Thus
TED, a private organisation that is free to add or remove whatever it
wishes from its blogs, removed their links to several videos of such
talks from their site. The videos are still available; they've not
been wiped from the internet, so any claims of censorship or a
cover-up is nonsense. Chopra and his ilk just seem to get upset when
people try to hold their claims up to the same standards as everyone
else in the scientific community, and Ariana Huffington is only too
happy to offer him a highly visible spot to complain about it from.
That's
this week in Atheism, Religion and Scepticism, folks. See you next
time.
