Anglican Mainstream

From The Christian Institute

Churchgoers in Woking can continue to park in the town’s off-street car parks for free on Sundays following an unsuccessful challenge by secularists.

The National Secular Society (NSS), a pressure group, challenged the policy saying that it could be a breach of the Equality Act 2010.

The challenge was launched after it emerged that attendees at town centre churches had saved more than £55,000 over a two-and-a-half-year period.

Following a year long debate on the matter Woking Borough Council has adopted a new policy statement.

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By Damian Thompson, Telegraph

Grindon Hall Christian School in Sunderland, currently a private all-through school but approved last October by the Department for Education to open as a Free School from this September, has a "Creation Policy" on its website in which they "affirm that to believe in God’s creation of the world is an entirely respectable position scientifically and rationally" and state they will "teach creation as a scientific theory"; while Sevenoaks Christian School, a secondary school in Kent approved to open from 2013, sets out the creationist beliefs of the school’s founders, and explains that creationism will be taught in Religious Education (RE).

The education secretary, Michael Gove, has approved three free schools run by groups with creationist views, including one with a document on its website declaring that it teaches "creation as a scientific theory".

By Stewart Cowan, Real Street

The evangelical Everyday Champions Church first proposed a free school that would teach creationism as a valid scientific theory last year.

 

That application was rejected by the Government on the basis that “the teaching of creationist views as a potentially valid alternative theory [to evolution] is not acceptable in a 21st-century state-funded school”.

 

Now a new bid submitted by a group of individuals from the Church, but without its formal backing, has been accepted. The backers say Exemplar Academy in Newark, Nottinghamshire, will have a faith ethos but will not be formally designated a faith school, and will only teach creationism in RE.

 

Richy Thompson, campaigners manager at the British Humanist Association, said that the proposed school was “absolutely still dangerous”.

 

The Department of Education said that the new school would be banned from teaching creationism in science classes, but it would be allowed in religious education lessons.

By Nicola McKenzie, Christian Today

The Christian Institute and the National Secular Society are speaking out on behalf of an 89-year-old atheist who claims he was threatened with arrest for posting in the window of his home a sign suggesting religion is a fairy tale. The organisations see the case as an example of why the Public Order Act needs to be revised.

John Richards is claiming that when police became aware of the sign hanging in a window of his home in Lincolnshire, they told him he could be arrested if it drew any complaints. The sign Richards placed for passersby to see reads: "Religions are fairy stories for adults."

"I am an atheist and I feel people are being misled by religion. I wanted to show people that if they thought they were alone there was at least one other person who thought that," Richards told local publication the Boston Standard last week.

"The police said I could be arrested if somebody complained and said they were insulted, but the sign was up two years ago and nobody responded or smashed the window," the retiree said.

Richards was reportedly told that the sign could be in violation of Section 5 of the Public Order Act, which prohibits causing "harassment, alarm or distress" to other people.

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Hat Tip: Barbara Gauthier

David Virtue recalls that Francis Schaeffer predicted the collapse of secular morality over a generation ago.  By discarding Christian religion, contemporary secular liberals have also succeeded in destroying their own moral underpinnings:

By Michael Gryboski , Christian Post

A nationwide secularist organization has established an atheist lobbying group in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

The Secular Coalition of America created a lobbying group to go to Richmond because they believe that the General Assembly has been influenced too much by religious views.

Johnnie Moore, vice president of Executive Projects at Liberty University in Lynchburg, told The Christian Post that the SCA's focus on his state was due to Virginia's importance on the national stage as a bellwether state.

"They clearly recognize Virginia is a state of great symbolic and national consequence," said Moore. "Many Virginians would consider it a compliment that our state is so committed to the founding principles of our nation that we would cause alarm to an organization whose agenda is as radical as this one."

According to a press release, the SCA's efforts in Virginia are just part of their overall mission to get lobbying chapters in every state, especially those who are considered by the organization to be the biggest offenders of church and state separation.

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By David Quinn, Iona Institute

An article in yesterday’s Irish Times set out to disprove the existence of aggressive secularism but ended up going a long way towards doing the opposite. Entitled ‘Evil, militant anti-Christian secularism is simply a myth’, it was full of scorn and contempt towards religion. Its underlying message to religious believers was clear; know your place.

This, of course, is the very essence of aggressive secularism. By definition, aggressive secularism is characterised by an aggressive attitude towards religion and by a desire to drive religion from the public arena.

The following passage from the article is a neat encapsulation of both the scornful attitude of aggressive secularism towards religion and the wish to marginalise and privatise it.

It reads: “On matters of society and science, religious belief should not even be a consideration yet, all too often, rational discourse is abandoned in favour of ancient religious assertions without a modicum of evidence or logic behind them. Stem cell research, gay marriage and abortion rights are just some of the issues where frank discussion is clouded by often misinformed religious objections.”

The author does not explain why it is irrational, or even necessarily religious to believe that human life begins at conception and is deserving of protection from that point on.

Nor does he explain why it is inherently irrational, or even religious, to believe in an institution whose primary social purpose is to maximise the number of men and women who raise their children together.

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By George Pitcher, Mailonline

I’m not one of those who believes that there is a new holy war between atheists and the Christian faith. But Britain’s most senior Roman Catholic, former Archbishop of Westminster Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor, strikes a chord when he speaks of a new secularism that is ‘very, very dangerous’ and which threatens our great national tradition of tolerant pluralism: ‘In the name of tolerance,’ he says, ‘it seems to me that tolerance is being abolished.’

The overwhelming majority of my atheist friends are precisely in the finest tradition of tolerant inclusivity and freedom of thought and belief. Our own Dr Simon Heffer, who bestrides these pages like a colossus, is a self-declared atheist, but would no more want to sweep religion from the public sphere than would Cardinal Murphy O’Connor.

That’s because most of our sentient secularists are in the post-Enlightenment tradition of believing that the state should not distinguish between consciences; there is an equality before the law for all those of any faith and of none. 

That is the tradition of rationalists and empiricists such as Hume, Locke and Rousseau (and, incidentally, an Enlightenment that saw no incompatibility between rationalist empiricism and religious belief). It is also the tradition of the English Church.

But there are those – and the Cardinal is right to identify them – who would wish to sweep religious faith from the public square, to consign it to the status of a private and eccentric hobby and to claim that the Christian faith, in particular, has no role in defining the character and governing institutions of this country.

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By Melanie Phillips, Standpoint Magazine

To judge from what we are reading and hearing almost every day at the moment, it would seem Britain is in the throes of a war of religion. A war, that is, between religion and atheism. Professor Richard Dawkins, the Savanarola of atheism, regularly hurls his thunderbolts at believers. Christianity, says the church, is under siege. Christians are being prevented from wearing the crucifix at work, being barred from adoption panels. Even Delia Smith has now brought her rolling pin to the fight to defend the faith.

At the heart of this great argument lies the assumption on the part of the anti-religion camp that this is a battle between reason and obscurantism, between rationality on the one hand and knuckle-dragging ignorance and prejudice on the other. And of course, that anti-religion camp is on the side of reason, and thus of intelligence, science, progress and freedom; whereas religious believers would undo the Enlightenment and take us all back to the dark ages of credulity, superstition and the shackling of the mind.

This assumption is based on a further given: that in the West this is the age of reason. And we think this, in large measure, because we have put religion, or faith, in a box labelled in very large letters, "Un-reason". Faith and reason, religion and science are supposedly inimical to each other. There is no overlap. They knock each other out.

So it follows that people who are intelligent can have no religious faith; those who are religious are either imbeciles or insane. Not only that, religious people are narrow, dogmatic, intolerant and unpleasant. Those with no religious faith are broad-minded, open, liberal and thoroughly splendid people whom you'd be delighted to meet at a dinner party. Little casts a chill over a fashionable table more than the disclosure that a guest believes in God.

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By Peter Mullen, Telegraph

I see that Professor Richard Dawkins is to be the subject of Beautiful Minds on BBC Four tonight. I wouldn’t like to assess his beauty, but where’s his mind? Of course he is an eminent zoologist, but when he ventures into theology he proves himself to be colossally ignorant. As if I, an innocent when it comes to natural history, should think that the whole of biology is contained in the phrase "Janet and John Look at Frogs".

Dawkins is a militant atheist who claims in his book The God Delusion that he will believe only those things for which “there is scientific evidence.” This must make life very difficult for him. For consider his proposition: “I will believe only that for which there is scientific evidence”. In order to sustain his argument, he must believe that that proposition is true. But its truth cannot be discovered by taking into account scientific evidence – for there is no scientific evidence for it.

John Polkinghorne is an Anglican priest and a scientist, one of only two priests who are also Fellows of the Royal Society. Polkinghorne is one of many scientists working today who have written sympathetically about the relationship between science and religion. Polkinghorne comments on Dawkins’ book as follows:

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By David Millward, Telegraph

Stripping Britain of its Christian foundations would leave the country vulnerable to “the most sinister of ideologies”, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Shrewsbury has warned.

The Rt Rev Mark Davies used his Easter Homily to express anxiety at the consequences of undermining Britain’s religious heritage.

He cited the recent history of Europe to voice fears extremism would fill the void if Christianity was weakened.

“It has, indeed, been the experience of this past century, as both Blessed John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI have observed how the most poisonous ideologies have arisen within the Christian nations of Europe,” he said.

“Thus Nazism or Communism attempted to discard the Christian inheritance of faith and morality as if it had never existed.

“They sought either to return to the pagan past or to “re-create” and “redeem” humanity by political will and ideology with terrible consequences.
 
“If Christianity is no longer to form the basis and the bedrock of our society then we are, indeed, left at the mercy of passing political projects and perhaps even the most sinister of ideologies.”

Bishop Davies became the latest influential religious leader to warn of the consequences of increasing secularisation.

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By Guy Stagg, Telegraph

by Kristine Kruszelnicki, LifeSite News

“The atheist community is a diverse community,” said a speaker at the American Atheist Convention in Washington, D.C., to a round of applause and cheers. “We’ve got people here from all genders, races, religious backgrounds, and sexual orientations.”

From The Christian Institute

An atheist ex-councillor who sued Bideford Town Council for saying prayers at meetings has won a £1,000 prize from the National Secular Society (NSS).

Clive Bone was presented with an award for “special achievement” at a ceremony in London earlier this month, with Professor Richard Dawkins and Lord Avebury among the 160 guests.

Mr Bone’s case against Bideford Town Council was backed by the NSS.

However, after the High Court controversially ruled that local councils have no lawful power to hold prayers during meetings, the Government fast-tracked new legislation effectively overruling the decision.

The Government has since written to all local councils in England, telling them that new laws restore their power to hold prayers at official meetings if they want to.

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From The Christian Institute

A secular bias in the public sector means faith groups don’t have equal access to public funding for community projects, academics say.

An “anti-Christian prejudice” means public officials are suspicious of giving grants to faith-based providers of services.

The academics examined the findings of years of research into the charitable sector.
 
They concluded that the public is missing out on services provided by religious groups because of the bias.

Dr Adam Dinham, who teaches at the University of London, said: “People and authorities which commission services from faith-based providers are often concerned they will have strings attached. If they can find other services to use, they will do.”

He added: “It goes back to a general concern about ‘what’s in it for them’.

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By William Oddie, Catholic Herald

If the Prime Minister doesn’t want this perception to take hold, he had better start listening

[...]  Another link between the right to wear the cross and the fight against the government’s intention to legalise same-sex marriage is ironically provided, though tangentially, by the European Court of Human Rights. This is not an institution I am fond of: but it has just handed down a very sensible decision on gay marriage in France, and may well hand down another on the right to wear the cross when it hears the case of two British women who have been told by our courts that they cannot wear this symbol of their religion at work. They will, scandalously, be opposed, on Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone’s orders by British Government lawyers: but they will, ironically, be supported by the government’s own political correctness quango, the Equality and Human Rights Commission. This is another institution the usefulness of which I have not always been convinced by: but it will nevertheless argue in the same European Court of Human Rights test case that workers should have legal protection if they wish to display a token of their religious faith at work.

They may well win their case. When the EU tried to outlaw publicly displayed crucifixes in Schools and hospitals in Italy, Silvio Berlusconi appealed to Strasbourg and won: on the face of it, this seems a similar case. Strasbourg, I have to admit, doesn’t always get it wrong.

It has just, for instance, opined that same-sex couples do not have a human right to marriage. A lesbian couple had tried to establish marriage rights under European anti-discrimination laws but the judges declared that “the European Convention on Human Rights does not require member states’ governments to grant same-sex couples access to marriage”.

“The ruling,” says the Telegraph, “is likely to have an impact on David Cameron’s drive to allow gay marriages.” But are they right? On the face of it, the court seems to be supporting traditional, one man-one woman (in other words, real) marriage: “the court considers that in view of the social, personal, and legal consequences of marriage, the applicants’ legal situation could not be said to be comparable to that of married couples”.

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By John Bingham, Telegraph

Christianity is under threat from a new, intolerant brand of “aggressive atheism” intent on driving religion out of public life, the Archbishop of York warned yesterday.

Dr John Sentamu, who is seen as the front-runner to replace Dr Rowan Williams as Archbishop of Canterbury, said arguments about tolerance were being used to disguise an increasingly militant anti-Christian tendency.
 
Speaking during a pastoral visit to the Diocese of Newcastle, Dr Sentamu said the modern day Church needed “renewal” to get its message across in the face of challenges to its position. “What we are facing isn’t so much secularism, it is what I call 'aggressive atheism’ disguising itself as secularism,” he said.
 
“I’ve never been against secularisation because it allows the possibility for good debate and disagreement. But there is a strand within it which has become so intolerant, they think it is tolerant but it isn’t. It is the assumption that religion should have no space anywhere.”

Read here
 

By Alexander Boot, Mailonline

Our (Conservative!) government has upheld employers' rights to sack any employee for wearing a visible cross or a crucifix. This is an outrage. But that two British women, Nadia Eweider and Shirley Chaplin, have to challenge that decision in the European Court of Human Rights is perhaps even a greater one.

Their assumption has to be that even the judiciary extension of a socialist Leviathan would be kinder to Christians than HMG is. And the greatest outrage of all is that they may well be right.

This is astounding, considering that upon her accession the HM part of HMG had to swear to 'maintain the Laws of God and the true profession of the Gospel.' In other words, in this reign at least, Britain is still legally a Christian country where, logically, the Christian faith has to be held supreme to any other. This means that, if members of any religion are to be banned from displaying symbols of their creed, Christianity should be the last to suffer that invidious fate. This isn't a matter of faith. It's a matter of constitutional fact.

So why would anyone object to a woman wearing a cross at work? The two organisations that banned the plaintiffs from doing so, BA and the Royal Devon & Exeter Health Trust, no doubt feel that, say, Muslims would be offended by this statement of infidelity to Allah.

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By Simon Walters and Glen Owen, Mailonline

Delia Smith is mounting a campaign to defend Christianity against attacks by 'militant neo-atheists' – who she claims are engaged in a 'running battle’ with believers.

The veteran television chef was prompted to make her outspoken remarks by a series of high-profile rows over the role of religion in modern life.

Ms Smith, 70, said: 'There is a running battle going on… and militant neo-atheists and devout secularists are busting a gut to drive us off the radar and try to convince us that we hardly exist.’

In the statement posted on her website, www.deliaonline.com – which has two million regular users – the chef added: 'I am a passionate believer but… we are somewhat under the cosh.'

Last night Ms Smith said she had been spurred into action by hearing the atheist scientist, Richard Dawkins, claim recently that religion was increasingly irrelevant in Britain.

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Sir Anthony Kenny chaired a dialogue at Oxford University between Archbishop Rowan Williams and Professor Richard Dawkins on the subject of "The nature of human beings and the question of their ultimate origin."

The event was hosted by the Sophia Europa Group of the Faculty of Theology, Oxford University.