On topic 'A group of 29 faith leaders have joined forces to oppose assisted dying in the biggest intervention from religious groups on the issue to date.
Senior figures representing Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus and Sikhs have warned that the assisted dying Bill will lead to people being pressured into ending their lives to avoid burdening families or the NHS. They say a change in law will turn a “right to die” into people thinking they have a “duty to die”.
In an open letter signed by the Bishop of London, the Roman Catholic Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster and the Chief Rabbi, they say they are “deeply concerned about the impact the Bill would have on the most vulnerable, opening up the possibility of life-threatening abuse and coercion”....Coming on the week that MPs vote on the controversial legislation, the letter says: “In the UK, it is estimated that 2.7 million older people have been subjected to abuse; many of these may also be vulnerable to pressure to end their lives prematurely“Disability campaigners and those working with women in abusive relationships have also highlighted the danger of unintended consequences should the law be changed.
“The experience of jurisdictions which have introduced similar legislation, such as Oregon and Canada, demonstrate how tragic these unintended consequences can be. Promised safeguards have not always protected the vulnerable and marginalised. Notably, the Bishop of London, the Right Rev Dame Sarah Mullally, signed for the Church of England – a move likely to spark speculation about her prospects as the next Archbishop of Canterbury.
She signed alongside Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, and Sir Ephraim Mirvis, the Chief Rabbi. Other signatories include Sayed Abdul Saheb al-Khoei, secretary general of the Al-Khoei Foundation, a prominent Muslim organisation; Zara Mohammed, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain; Bhai Sahib Mohinder Singh Ahluwalia, the chair of the Guru Nanak Nishkam Sewak Jatha, one of the UK’s leading Sikh organisations; and Trupti Patel, the president of the Hindu Forum of Britain representing over 300 Hindu groups.' https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/11/24/assisted-dying-bill-religious-leaders-letter-duty-to-die/
The Opinium survey of over 10,000 people in the UK found that 75% were in favour of assisted dying so it would win in a referendum.
"The polling also found a strong majority for law change among religious people, with two-thirds (66%) of those who follow a religion stating their support, including 69% of Christians and 65% of Catholics."
Depends on the question, asked and if it is a slippery slope, even the Yougov poll in the thread header shows most voters oppose euthanasia for any reason or for mental health reasons
There isn't a slippery slope in the UK. Any change in the law would have to be agreed by a majority in parliament.
The precise question was " To what extent would you support or oppose making it legal for someone to seek “assisted dying” in the UK, and how strong is your view?"
The answers were:
Strongly support 40% Somewhat support 38%
Somewhat oppose 8% Strongly oppose 7%
Don’t know / Prefer not to say 8%
NET: Support 78% NET: Oppose 15%
As Canada shows it ends up a slippery slope, hence Polievre has promised to reverse much of the expansion of assisted dying under Trudeau's Liberal government if his Conservatives win the next Canadian election
"Slippery slope" implies you unwillingly or inadvertently slide down it. It is an emotive phrase.
In the UK, any change in the scope of assisted dying would have to be agreed by a majority in parliament. That is democracy. I'm assuming you are in favour of that.
EDIT: I hope you noticed that 78% supported assisted dying and only 15% opposed. You didn't comment on that.
The slope envisaged for this is busy judges tick boxing, the second medical opinion becoming highly socially pressured to agree with the first etc
Quite easy to see how the safeguards envisaged become a nullity.
I lean in favour of assisted dying, but don't have a strong view.
Of course, one can take one's stance from our moral leaders - any proposed reform that churches oppose, from ending the burning of witches and heretics to legalising divorce to more or less anything Mrs Thatcher did, is usually an excellent idea.
Divorce laws in the UK are too liberal now with no fault divorce. Having a negative effect on the family and fertility rates
What conceivable benefit would you expect to acru from restricting divorce? Couples stuck in loveless marriages are not likely to bring children into them and if they did it would be for entirely the wrong reasons to the detriment of everyone.
Unless it was an arranged marriage no marriage would be loveless otherwise they would never have got married in the first place.
No marriage is perfect, you work through the downs and arguments as well as the ups
What a naive view.
Love sometimes lasts, but love sometimes dies. At which point it becomes loveless.
Go through ups and downs, yes, my wife and I have had ups and downs and we still love each other. That is a healthy marriage.
If you only have downs and the love is gone, then it's not a healthy marriage and it should be terminated.
All my biological grandparents divorced. Both my dad's parents remarried before I was even born and had a happy, healthy second marriage that took them to the end of their lives. Them divorcing and remarrying was the best thing that ever happened to them, and the family as a whole.
I was also lucky enough then to grow up with 5 grandparents (3 biological, 2 not) and am fortunate still have the two non-biological grandparents whom I love as my grandparents every bit as much as the biological ones.
My father's parents divorced and it had a negative impact on his teenage years and hit his mother hard while his father remarried.
Divorce is simply too easy nowadays, unless there is adultery or domestic violence involved divorce should be an absolute last resort and best avoided
My mother got a divorce in the late 1960's. It was incredibly difficult and took an absolute age, being one of the reasons the Denning Reforms came about. My father was a serial philanderer and he walked out the family home just after my sister was born in 1962. There was no fault on my mother's part. He was finally forced by the courts to pay maintenance in the princely sum of £4 a week. But the marriage still could not be ended for an age longer.
Allowing my mother to escape being trapped in a marriage was no "last resort"; splitting from him was not "best avoided", as for one thing it would have prevented her getting another successful, joyous marriage to my stepfather. The strain of the broken relationship and the attempts to get a divorce caused her to have several nervous breakdowns. No child should have had to endure seeing their parent go through ECT.
Your world view is so constrained. It would result in so much pain for others if rigidly adopted.
I have already said I don't oppose divorce on the grounds of adultery, even Jesus did not oppose divorce when one party had committed sexual immorality and cheated on the other.
That is not the same as supporting no fault divorce though, which I oppose even though it is now legal in the UK
"Sorry, kids, me and yer dad can't split up, even though we hate each other because some bloke called Jesus, who may or may not have existed 2000 years ago, wouldn't like it and the government don't like it very much, either, so we'll just stay together and make your life a misery until you're old enough to leave home" That's right?
If you clearly hated each other you would never have married in the first place. Most kids want both their parents at home with them
1 - People change 2 - Sometimes, especially when young and full of hormones, we make bad decisions 3 - Information that wasn't known beforehand can come to light
Your stance rejects all of the above. My mother is twice divorced. Anathema to you. For her first marriage, she fell deeply in love. A year or two down the line, her husband was diagnosed with schizophrenia. They had one daughter by then, but decided to divorce when, in the middle of an episode, he threatened the baby.
For her second marriage, she married "on the rebound." Partly because she was now used to being away from her over-controlling mother. She and my father had very different personalities - which they found out. Unfortunately, after the marriage. After several years of trying their best to make it work (and two children), they agreed to divorce.
To be honest, their divorce was the best thing they could have done for the children (me included). Rather than grow up in an air of mutual resentment and "making the best of it" through clenched teeth, we grew up in a home of love, learning, and laughter. Mum and Dad got on much better after the divorce and when they could live separately and when they didn't have to be in each other's business all the time. I actually think it was that which may have led to my sister and I both being in stable long-term marriages (her for 30 years+ at this point, me approaching 25 years). We didn't have the experience of the resentment we would doubtless have had in that alternate universe.
I reject entirely your didactic and unempathic stance.
Yes empathy is only uber liberalism, everyone else is evil and beyond the pale. Marriage, commitment of both parents to raising children, the nation's fertility rate, all irrelevant in comparison to the desires of the self first.
Well tough, I represent an argument millions agree with, especially the religious and don't give a shit whether you dislike me making it or not I will continue to do so
You represent an argument that was rejected 70 years ago and continues to be rejected since.
Far from it, Italy has recently elected a government with a more traditional view of women and the family, the US has also just elected a President and Congress with a more traditional view of the family.
The backlash against wokeism and uber liberalism has begun
Wrong.
America has just elected a twice divorced, repeatedly unfaithful adulterer as President.
Not a traditional view of the family.
And Giorgia Meloni has had a kid out of wedlock. Not exactly a bastion of religious morality.
One of the curiosities of right-populism is how many of its leaders don't reflect the values their rhetoric espouses. There's a definite lack of Corbyn/Livingstone like figures- even when their views were odd/wrong, they did sort of try to live by them.
Not that curious. There's a simple explanation.
Neither the leaders nor the voters give the slightest damn about Biblical values. HYUFD shows his contempt for the teaching of Jesus on a daily basis.
All they care about is cherrypicking elements they care about and then telling other people what they can and can't do.
Rubbish, Jesus was not a communist woke social liberal
For his day he bloody well was.
Overturning the money tables and the whole eye of the needle thing. Wanting to feed the hungry, help the poor, heal the sick.
He was incredibly woke for his era.
Wokeism is ultra pro LGBTQ+, pro division on race and sexuality lines with a particular rejection of white heterosexual male 'privilege' and uber feminist (albeit with some clash with them and the equally woke uber trans).
It is perfectly possible for big corporations to be very woke and many now are and for a poor man to be socially conservative and anti woke. Hence Harris won lots of executives from the former and Trump lots of the latter
I would seriously recommend you and and chill for a bit offline. You used to be a fairly mainstream Tory, but this culture war stuff from you is getting increasingly strange.
Jesus was clear that the route to heaven was not via the rules and traditions of the Pharisees but rather via compassion and charity to the least in society.
On personal morality his most pertinent point when stopping a stoning of an adulteress was "let him who is without sin cast the first stone".
I think it is incorrect and blasphemous to claim Jesus for any political party or view. His Kingdom is not of this world.
If memory serves, the route to heaven is acceptance of Jesus Christ as your saviour in your heart and sincere repentance of your sins. The recommendations on how to behave are desirable but not strictly necessary except to demonstrate sincerity.
I think most Christians would claim that both Grace and Works are needed,
Yours is the view according to Paul, but the James 1:22-26 is pretty clear that hearing the Gospel is not enough:
22 Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. 23 Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror 24 and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. 25 But whoever looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues in it—not forgetting what they have heard, but doing it—they will be blessed in what they do.
26 Those who consider themselves religious and yet do not keep a tight rein on their tongues deceive themselves, and their religion is worthless. 27 Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.
Additionally on several occasions Jesus cites as good examples people who do not abide by the scriptures such as the Roman Centurion or the Good Samaritan.
Losing a bit of confidence in the Amorin revolution now. 14 minutes without a meaningful attempt on goal.
And having taken a lead they've now thrown it away.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
To be honest they have been very ordinary in this half and totally outplayed by Ipswich. The midfield looks far too stationary with Eriksson and Casemiro. They need Mainoo and Ugarte on and to get many more balls for the forwards to run on to.
The People's Vote petition demanding a Second Election has reached a million signatures.
Good news. There will be one. It may not be until July 2029, but there will certainly be one.
Even better news, it will be the UK's 59th election not its second.
You'd have thought we'd be good at them by now. Yet we elect the Conservatives most of the time.
The problem is that the Conservatives are just too welcoming so they suck up all the political talent.
The Conservatives at their best are a broad church welcoming everyone centre right. Atheists, republicans and others can sit alongside traditional conservatives in the party. Normally.
Labour at its worst is more dominated by the "moral crusade or nothing" philosophy so are less welcoming to contradictory viewpoints.
There are noteworthy exceptions to this. Especially on the site.
The largest number of foodbanks in the U.K., from any single organisation, are led by the Trussell Trust, an Anglican charity.
When i was in Southern Italy a few years ago at the height of their economic crisis, the only people left locally with any interest to feed the hungry were the Catholic Church.
That may be true. But given what Welby has just resigned for, I might suggest that there is also a massive amount of harm done by organised churches as well. Yes, that was just one case: but it's perfectly possible to point to many, many more, including some organised by a church on a massive scale. e.g. Magdalene Laundries.
And the CofE mortgage schemes were utterly exploitative of their clergy. Shame on them.
There were also sexual abuse scandals in the BBC, paedophiles in boarding schools, the Scouts and youth football clubs and sex abusers in Hollywood and even Harrods and Parliament and the City.
It is no surprise those who want to carry out sexual abuse are attracted to areas of establishment status or wealth and paedophiles are attracted to jobs which give them access to children.
However safeguarding checks including in the Church are massively better than they were in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s and 1990s when most of these incidents occurred and we now have the DBS too
The incidents Weldby resigned for are much more recent.
I agree that people who want to abuse other people (and it is not just sexual abuse) will try to get into positions of power. The problem is that time and time again, church after church just covers it up. Often, moving priests onto other parishes so they can just resume their behaviour.
Or the behaviour was even sanctioned by the church.
They aren't, Smyth's abuse was committed in the 1980s and 1990s and he wasn't even a priest, they took place on Christian camps, he was a barrister by trade.
Now priests have to go through multiple safeguarding and DBS checks to get Parish posts
And AIUI the church was told back in the 1980s, and the warnings were ignored.
"It also highlighted how evidence of crimes had been gathered in the 1980s but was suppressed, including details of children being physically and sexually abused. ... "The scale and severity of the practice was horrific," noted the so-called Ruston report, named after the Rev Mark Ruston, who compiled it in 1982." (1)
You are excusing the inexcusable. The churches are not interested in morality or people; they are interested in power and money. Individuals within may be good, moral people; but the entire stinking edifices they work within are rotten.
I am agnostic. I like the idea of God, and I often pray. I try to live my life according to a morality that is informed by Christianity. But the reason I don't join a church?
It’s strange how things that were in edition after edition of Private Eye didn’t happen. Until Real Media took up the story.
In fact, the only scandal that hasn’t been in Private Eye, before it broke, was Rotherham. Or does anyone know of others?
Speaking of Private Eye, does anyone want to run a book on which scandal reported in the Eye will break next? Break next defined a front page of BBC.com
Every day I learn something new on PB. Today, I learnt that Jesus was a carpenter, and not a welfare claimant. I'm astonished.
Actually his earthly “dad” (whose trade he followed) was a builder. And apparently moderately prosperous. Hence the schooling for the kid. Which would have been paid for.
So he was inline to inherit a family business, and privately educated.
Wonder what rate of IHT applied?
Well, in his father's house there are many rooms, so you'd have to imagine he'd be in favour of a large exemption for personal primary residences.
I lean in favour of assisted dying, but don't have a strong view.
Of course, one can take one's stance from our moral leaders - any proposed reform that churches oppose, from ending the burning of witches and heretics to legalising divorce to more or less anything Mrs Thatcher did, is usually an excellent idea.
Divorce laws in the UK are too liberal now with no fault divorce. Having a negative effect on the family and fertility rates
What conceivable benefit would you expect to acru from restricting divorce? Couples stuck in loveless marriages are not likely to bring children into them and if they did it would be for entirely the wrong reasons to the detriment of everyone.
Unless it was an arranged marriage no marriage would be loveless otherwise they would never have got married in the first place.
No marriage is perfect, you work through the downs and arguments as well as the ups
What a naive view.
Love sometimes lasts, but love sometimes dies. At which point it becomes loveless.
Go through ups and downs, yes, my wife and I have had ups and downs and we still love each other. That is a healthy marriage.
If you only have downs and the love is gone, then it's not a healthy marriage and it should be terminated.
All my biological grandparents divorced. Both my dad's parents remarried before I was even born and had a happy, healthy second marriage that took them to the end of their lives. Them divorcing and remarrying was the best thing that ever happened to them, and the family as a whole.
I was also lucky enough then to grow up with 5 grandparents (3 biological, 2 not) and am fortunate still have the two non-biological grandparents whom I love as my grandparents every bit as much as the biological ones.
My father's parents divorced and it had a negative impact on his teenage years and hit his mother hard while his father remarried.
Divorce is simply too easy nowadays, unless there is adultery or domestic violence involved divorce should be an absolute last resort and best avoided
My mother got a divorce in the late 1960's. It was incredibly difficult and took an absolute age, being one of the reasons the Denning Reforms came about. My father was a serial philanderer and he walked out the family home just after my sister was born in 1962. There was no fault on my mother's part. He was finally forced by the courts to pay maintenance in the princely sum of £4 a week. But the marriage still could not be ended for an age longer.
Allowing my mother to escape being trapped in a marriage was no "last resort"; splitting from him was not "best avoided", as for one thing it would have prevented her getting another successful, joyous marriage to my stepfather. The strain of the broken relationship and the attempts to get a divorce caused her to have several nervous breakdowns. No child should have had to endure seeing their parent go through ECT.
Your world view is so constrained. It would result in so much pain for others if rigidly adopted.
I have already said I don't oppose divorce on the grounds of adultery, even Jesus did not oppose divorce when one party had committed sexual immorality and cheated on the other.
That is not the same as supporting no fault divorce though, which I oppose even though it is now legal in the UK
"Sorry, kids, me and yer dad can't split up, even though we hate each other because some bloke called Jesus, who may or may not have existed 2000 years ago, wouldn't like it and the government don't like it very much, either, so we'll just stay together and make your life a misery until you're old enough to leave home" That's right?
If you clearly hated each other you would never have married in the first place. Most kids want both their parents at home with them
1 - People change 2 - Sometimes, especially when young and full of hormones, we make bad decisions 3 - Information that wasn't known beforehand can come to light
Your stance rejects all of the above. My mother is twice divorced. Anathema to you. For her first marriage, she fell deeply in love. A year or two down the line, her husband was diagnosed with schizophrenia. They had one daughter by then, but decided to divorce when, in the middle of an episode, he threatened the baby.
For her second marriage, she married "on the rebound." Partly because she was now used to being away from her over-controlling mother. She and my father had very different personalities - which they found out. Unfortunately, after the marriage. After several years of trying their best to make it work (and two children), they agreed to divorce.
To be honest, their divorce was the best thing they could have done for the children (me included). Rather than grow up in an air of mutual resentment and "making the best of it" through clenched teeth, we grew up in a home of love, learning, and laughter. Mum and Dad got on much better after the divorce and when they could live separately and when they didn't have to be in each other's business all the time. I actually think it was that which may have led to my sister and I both being in stable long-term marriages (her for 30 years+ at this point, me approaching 25 years). We didn't have the experience of the resentment we would doubtless have had in that alternate universe.
I reject entirely your didactic and unempathic stance.
Yes empathy is only uber liberalism, everyone else is evil and beyond the pale. Marriage, commitment of both parents to raising children, the nation's fertility rate, all irrelevant in comparison to the desires of the self first.
Well tough, I represent an argument millions agree with, especially the religious and don't give a shit whether you dislike me making it or not I will continue to do so
You represent an argument that was rejected 70 years ago and continues to be rejected since.
Far from it, Italy has recently elected a government with a more traditional view of women and the family, the US has also just elected a President and Congress with a more traditional view of the family.
The backlash against wokeism and uber liberalism has begun
Wrong.
America has just elected a twice divorced, repeatedly unfaithful adulterer as President.
Not a traditional view of the family.
And Giorgia Meloni has had a kid out of wedlock. Not exactly a bastion of religious morality.
One of the curiosities of right-populism is how many of its leaders don't reflect the values their rhetoric espouses. There's a definite lack of Corbyn/Livingstone like figures- even when their views were odd/wrong, they did sort of try to live by them.
Not that curious. There's a simple explanation.
Neither the leaders nor the voters give the slightest damn about Biblical values. HYUFD shows his contempt for the teaching of Jesus on a daily basis.
All they care about is cherrypicking elements they care about and then telling other people what they can and can't do.
Rubbish, Jesus was not a communist woke social liberal
For his day he bloody well was.
Overturning the money tables and the whole eye of the needle thing. Wanting to feed the hungry, help the poor, heal the sick.
He was incredibly woke for his era.
Wokeism is ultra pro LGBTQ+, pro division on race and sexuality lines with a particular rejection of white heterosexual male 'privilege' and uber feminist (albeit with some clash with them and the equally woke uber trans).
It is perfectly possible for big corporations to be very woke and many now are and for a poor man to be socially conservative and anti woke. Hence Harris won lots of executives from the former and Trump lots of the latter
I would seriously recommend you and and chill for a bit offline. You used to be a fairly mainstream Tory, but this culture war stuff from you is getting increasingly strange.
Jesus was clear that the route to heaven was not via the rules and traditions of the Pharisees but rather via compassion and charity to the least in society.
On personal morality his most pertinent point when stopping a stoning of an adulteress was "let him who is without sin cast the first stone".
I think it is incorrect and blasphemous to claim Jesus for any political party or view. His Kingdom is not of this world.
If Christianity and its Churches were more like you and Jesus, and less like HYUFD and Paul, I'd respect it a lot more.
Christians are still humans, they are just Christian ones. In most cases, following the example of Christ leads to living a life with a greater element of giving and social responsibility, but it doesn't transform you into an angel.
A significant problem is that far too many Christians do not try to follow the example of Christ, and instead pick the bits out of his life and the bible that allow them to live their lives as they want. Which Christ may not have approved of.
I'm really at the stage where I do wonder if organised religion has caused far more harm to the world than it has caused good.
If you have the statistics to support this view, I am interested to read them. Everything that I have read indicates that on average, Christians are far likelier to engage in charitable and other positive social activity than their non-Christian counterparts.
I also think that there's a huge trend in popular media to demonise Christianity, in ways both clearly stated (evil Christian characters) and indicated (evil characters in fantasy or pre-Christian settings but who demonstrate clear Christian traits), and this does colour views, especially when you don't really have your guard up against what is basically propaganda.
No statistics. But I would point you to our very own HYUFD as an example of someone who wants more wrong done in the world. As this thread shows.
"especially when you don't really have your guard up against what is basically propaganda."
Ahem. *you* said that????
Propaganda can come in the form of misinformation, but it can also come in the form of negative portrayals of a target group in popular drama - something discovered by the Germans when they created Jud Suss, a drama that featured an evil Jew, which was enormously more successful than their previous attempts at propaganda film documentaries portraying Jews as rats, which had been counterproductive. Similar portrayals of Christians are everywhere in popular culture.
I can't think of any such portrayals of Christians in popular culture, which is unsurprising given that Christians are a major consumer of pop culture and people don't like pissing off their customers.
What I do see is such Christians in real life, such as HYUFD of this parish.
Most pop-culture references to Christianity are gently jovial than outright nasty portrayals. And atheists tend to have equally jovial references too.
EG this exchange between the very atheist Sheldon Cooper and his very religious mother after he accidentally sees his mother engaged in coitus outside of wedlock.
Sheldon Cooper : I think what bothers me the most is the hypocrisy. Doesn't this contradict all the religious rules you've been expounding your whole life?
Mary Cooper : You're right, it does. And it is something I have been struggling with these days.
Sheldon Cooper : Then why are you doing it?
Mary Cooper : Because I'm not perfect, Shelly, and that man's booty is.
Sheldon Cooper : Well, this is confusing for me. But I don't want to stand in the way of your happiness so I'll condemn you internally while maintaining an outward appearance of acceptance.
Mary Cooper : That is very Christian of you.
I'm not really surprised, because you are the sort of mark who would simply assimilate such material without giving it any thought, except to grow a bit more strident in your anti-Christian diatribes.
A random example of the explicit form would be the dramatisations of The Handmaid's Tale - but there are too many to even mention. Any explicitly Christian character in popular media is destined to turn out to be a hypocrite philanderer at best and an axe murderer at worst.
A random example of the implicit form would be from the film Clash of the Titans, where a proto-Christian sect led by a form of prophet attempts to sacrifice Princess Andromeda to the Kracken. Or in 300, where the Persian King Xerxes (I could have that name wrong) asks the disabled character to 'kneel' before him as part of an extended allegory on Christianity vs. pagan religions. Or in series one of Game of Thrones, there's a portrayal of a sect that follows 'a good shepherd', curing the body of a tribal King but seeming to steal his soul. They all end up being burned to death afaicr. You can have a good giggle at these examples, but should you adopt a more thoughtful approach and rewatch the clips, you'll see I'm right.
Oh what a pathetic snowflake you are.
None of those are remotely comparable to Germans portraying Jews as rats.
You can have a giggle at anyone and everyone, pick any category ever, including atheists, and there will be examples of people having a giggle at them, as there absolutely should be.
It is unhealthy not to have a sense of humour or self-deprecation.
I am not saying that they are remotely comparable to the Germans portraying jews as rats - they did this in The Eternal Jew, a documentary featuring stock footage of rats, which as I've said, was incredibly unpopular, making ladies faint in the cinema. The Germans then decided to stick to far more insidious portrayals within rip-roaring entertainment blockbusters, like Jud Suss, which was far more successful, and is very similar to the way Christians are portrayed in popular drama these days: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jud_Süß
The People's Vote petition demanding a Second Election has reached a million signatures.
Good news. There will be one. It may not be until July 2029, but there will certainly be one.
Even better news, it will be the UK's 59th election not its second.
You'd have thought we'd be good at them by now. Yet we elect the Conservatives most of the time.
The problem is that the Conservatives are just too welcoming so they suck up all the political talent.
The Conservatives at their best are a broad church welcoming everyone centre right. Atheists, republicans and others can sit alongside traditional conservatives in the party. Normally.
Labour at its worst is more dominated by the "moral crusade or nothing" philosophy so are less welcoming to contradictory viewpoints.
There are noteworthy exceptions to this. Especially on the site.
I lean in favour of assisted dying, but don't have a strong view.
Of course, one can take one's stance from our moral leaders - any proposed reform that churches oppose, from ending the burning of witches and heretics to legalising divorce to more or less anything Mrs Thatcher did, is usually an excellent idea.
Divorce laws in the UK are too liberal now with no fault divorce. Having a negative effect on the family and fertility rates
What conceivable benefit would you expect to acru from restricting divorce? Couples stuck in loveless marriages are not likely to bring children into them and if they did it would be for entirely the wrong reasons to the detriment of everyone.
Unless it was an arranged marriage no marriage would be loveless otherwise they would never have got married in the first place.
No marriage is perfect, you work through the downs and arguments as well as the ups
What a naive view.
Love sometimes lasts, but love sometimes dies. At which point it becomes loveless.
Go through ups and downs, yes, my wife and I have had ups and downs and we still love each other. That is a healthy marriage.
If you only have downs and the love is gone, then it's not a healthy marriage and it should be terminated.
All my biological grandparents divorced. Both my dad's parents remarried before I was even born and had a happy, healthy second marriage that took them to the end of their lives. Them divorcing and remarrying was the best thing that ever happened to them, and the family as a whole.
I was also lucky enough then to grow up with 5 grandparents (3 biological, 2 not) and am fortunate still have the two non-biological grandparents whom I love as my grandparents every bit as much as the biological ones.
My father's parents divorced and it had a negative impact on his teenage years and hit his mother hard while his father remarried.
Divorce is simply too easy nowadays, unless there is adultery or domestic violence involved divorce should be an absolute last resort and best avoided
My mother got a divorce in the late 1960's. It was incredibly difficult and took an absolute age, being one of the reasons the Denning Reforms came about. My father was a serial philanderer and he walked out the family home just after my sister was born in 1962. There was no fault on my mother's part. He was finally forced by the courts to pay maintenance in the princely sum of £4 a week. But the marriage still could not be ended for an age longer.
Allowing my mother to escape being trapped in a marriage was no "last resort"; splitting from him was not "best avoided", as for one thing it would have prevented her getting another successful, joyous marriage to my stepfather. The strain of the broken relationship and the attempts to get a divorce caused her to have several nervous breakdowns. No child should have had to endure seeing their parent go through ECT.
Your world view is so constrained. It would result in so much pain for others if rigidly adopted.
I have already said I don't oppose divorce on the grounds of adultery, even Jesus did not oppose divorce when one party had committed sexual immorality and cheated on the other.
That is not the same as supporting no fault divorce though, which I oppose even though it is now legal in the UK
"Sorry, kids, me and yer dad can't split up, even though we hate each other because some bloke called Jesus, who may or may not have existed 2000 years ago, wouldn't like it and the government don't like it very much, either, so we'll just stay together and make your life a misery until you're old enough to leave home" That's right?
If you clearly hated each other you would never have married in the first place. Most kids want both their parents at home with them
1 - People change 2 - Sometimes, especially when young and full of hormones, we make bad decisions 3 - Information that wasn't known beforehand can come to light
Your stance rejects all of the above. My mother is twice divorced. Anathema to you. For her first marriage, she fell deeply in love. A year or two down the line, her husband was diagnosed with schizophrenia. They had one daughter by then, but decided to divorce when, in the middle of an episode, he threatened the baby.
For her second marriage, she married "on the rebound." Partly because she was now used to being away from her over-controlling mother. She and my father had very different personalities - which they found out. Unfortunately, after the marriage. After several years of trying their best to make it work (and two children), they agreed to divorce.
To be honest, their divorce was the best thing they could have done for the children (me included). Rather than grow up in an air of mutual resentment and "making the best of it" through clenched teeth, we grew up in a home of love, learning, and laughter. Mum and Dad got on much better after the divorce and when they could live separately and when they didn't have to be in each other's business all the time. I actually think it was that which may have led to my sister and I both being in stable long-term marriages (her for 30 years+ at this point, me approaching 25 years). We didn't have the experience of the resentment we would doubtless have had in that alternate universe.
I reject entirely your didactic and unempathic stance.
Yes empathy is only uber liberalism, everyone else is evil and beyond the pale. Marriage, commitment of both parents to raising children, the nation's fertility rate, all irrelevant in comparison to the desires of the self first.
Well tough, I represent an argument millions agree with, especially the religious and don't give a shit whether you dislike me making it or not I will continue to do so
You represent an argument that was rejected 70 years ago and continues to be rejected since.
Far from it, Italy has recently elected a government with a more traditional view of women and the family, the US has also just elected a President and Congress with a more traditional view of the family.
The backlash against wokeism and uber liberalism has begun
Wrong.
America has just elected a twice divorced, repeatedly unfaithful adulterer as President.
Not a traditional view of the family.
And Giorgia Meloni has had a kid out of wedlock. Not exactly a bastion of religious morality.
One of the curiosities of right-populism is how many of its leaders don't reflect the values their rhetoric espouses. There's a definite lack of Corbyn/Livingstone like figures- even when their views were odd/wrong, they did sort of try to live by them.
Not that curious. There's a simple explanation.
Neither the leaders nor the voters give the slightest damn about Biblical values. HYUFD shows his contempt for the teaching of Jesus on a daily basis.
All they care about is cherrypicking elements they care about and then telling other people what they can and can't do.
Rubbish, Jesus was not a communist woke social liberal
For his day he bloody well was.
Overturning the money tables and the whole eye of the needle thing. Wanting to feed the hungry, help the poor, heal the sick.
He was incredibly woke for his era.
Wokeism is ultra pro LGBTQ+, pro division on race and sexuality lines with a particular rejection of white heterosexual male 'privilege' and uber feminist (albeit with some clash with them and the equally woke uber trans).
It is perfectly possible for big corporations to be very woke and many now are and for a poor man to be socially conservative and anti woke. Hence Harris won lots of executives from the former and Trump lots of the latter
I would seriously recommend you and and chill for a bit offline. You used to be a fairly mainstream Tory, but this culture war stuff from you is getting increasingly strange.
Jesus was clear that the route to heaven was not via the rules and traditions of the Pharisees but rather via compassion and charity to the least in society.
On personal morality his most pertinent point when stopping a stoning of an adulteress was "let him who is without sin cast the first stone".
I think it is incorrect and blasphemous to claim Jesus for any political party or view. His Kingdom is not of this world.
If Christianity and its Churches were more like you and Jesus, and less like HYUFD and Paul, I'd respect it a lot more.
Christians are still humans, they are just Christian ones. In most cases, following the example of Christ leads to living a life with a greater element of giving and social responsibility, but it doesn't transform you into an angel.
A significant problem is that far too many Christians do not try to follow the example of Christ, and instead pick the bits out of his life and the bible that allow them to live their lives as they want. Which Christ may not have approved of.
I'm really at the stage where I do wonder if organised religion has caused far more harm to the world than it has caused good.
If you have the statistics to support this view, I am interested to read them. Everything that I have read indicates that on average, Christians are far likelier to engage in charitable and other positive social activity than their non-Christian counterparts.
I also think that there's a huge trend in popular media to demonise Christianity, in ways both clearly stated (evil Christian characters) and indicated (evil characters in fantasy or pre-Christian settings but who demonstrate clear Christian traits), and this does colour views, especially when you don't really have your guard up against what is basically propaganda.
No statistics. But I would point you to our very own HYUFD as an example of someone who wants more wrong done in the world. As this thread shows.
"especially when you don't really have your guard up against what is basically propaganda."
Ahem. *you* said that????
Propaganda can come in the form of misinformation, but it can also come in the form of negative portrayals of a target group in popular drama - something discovered by the Germans when they created Jud Suss, a drama that featured an evil Jew, which was enormously more successful than their previous attempts at propaganda film documentaries portraying Jews as rats, which had been counterproductive. Similar portrayals of Christians are everywhere in popular culture.
I can't think of any such portrayals of Christians in popular culture, which is unsurprising given that Christians are a major consumer of pop culture and people don't like pissing off their customers.
What I do see is such Christians in real life, such as HYUFD of this parish.
Most pop-culture references to Christianity are gently jovial than outright nasty portrayals. And atheists tend to have equally jovial references too.
EG this exchange between the very atheist Sheldon Cooper and his very religious mother after he accidentally sees his mother engaged in coitus outside of wedlock.
Sheldon Cooper : I think what bothers me the most is the hypocrisy. Doesn't this contradict all the religious rules you've been expounding your whole life?
Mary Cooper : You're right, it does. And it is something I have been struggling with these days.
Sheldon Cooper : Then why are you doing it?
Mary Cooper : Because I'm not perfect, Shelly, and that man's booty is.
Sheldon Cooper : Well, this is confusing for me. But I don't want to stand in the way of your happiness so I'll condemn you internally while maintaining an outward appearance of acceptance.
Mary Cooper : That is very Christian of you.
I'm not really surprised, because you are the sort of mark who would simply assimilate such material without giving it any thought, except to grow a bit more strident in your anti-Christian diatribes.
A random example of the explicit form would be the dramatisations of The Handmaid's Tale - but there are too many to even mention. Any explicitly Christian character in popular media is destined to turn out to be a hypocrite philanderer at best and an axe murderer at worst.
A random example of the implicit form would be from the film Clash of the Titans, where a proto-Christian sect led by a form of prophet attempts to sacrifice Princess Andromeda to the Kracken. Or in 300, where the Persian King Xerxes (I could have that name wrong) asks the disabled character to 'kneel' before him as part of an extended allegory on Christianity vs. pagan religions. Or in series one of Game of Thrones, there's a portrayal of a sect that follows 'a good shepherd', curing the body of a tribal King but seeming to steal his soul. They all end up being burned to death afaicr. You can have a good giggle at these examples, but should you adopt a more thoughtful approach and rewatch the clips, you'll see I'm right.
Oh what a pathetic snowflake you are.
None of those are remotely comparable to Germans portraying Jews as rats.
You can have a giggle at anyone and everyone, pick any category ever, including atheists, and there will be examples of people having a giggle at them, as there absolutely should be.
It is unhealthy not to have a sense of humour or self-deprecation.
I am not saying that they are remotely comparable to the Germans portraying jews as rats - they did this in The Eternal Jew, a documentary featuring stock footage of rats, which as I've said, was incredibly unpopular, making ladies faint in the cinema. The Germans then decided to stick to far more insidious portrayals within rip-roaring entertainment blockbusters, like Jud Suss, which was far more successful, and is very similar to the way Christians are portrayed by in popular drama these days: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jud_Süß
Christians are not portrayed more critically in popular dramas than anyone else.
Another example of a serious economic issue for the UK, for which a non partisan solution is desperately needed.
How long does it take to build a mile of tramway?
https://www.samdumitriu.com/p/how-long-does-it-take-to-build-a Birmingham is right now building a mile long extension to the West Midlands Metro, which will end up taking 13 years in total from the initial proposal to the first trams operating. More than six years were spent in the planning process. This isn’t atypical either, tram construction experts we’ve spoken to have said that schemes in the UK take more than a decade to get built.
Countries that build trams cheaper, tend to also approve and build them faster. Dijon, France built their 12 mile tramway network in just two years, after two years of planning. Dijon’s tramway cost just £38m per mile. Birmingham’s cost six times more at £233m per mile. ..
It's not just trams.
Trams, roads, rails, houses, prisons, factories, power supply and every other dammed thing.
Our planning system is broken and not fit for purpose.
Hence "another example". I genuinely think we could add at least a couple of percent to GDP just by sorting this.
Politically hard to force through, but economically, it ought to be an easy win.
I lean in favour of assisted dying, but don't have a strong view.
Of course, one can take one's stance from our moral leaders - any proposed reform that churches oppose, from ending the burning of witches and heretics to legalising divorce to more or less anything Mrs Thatcher did, is usually an excellent idea.
Divorce laws in the UK are too liberal now with no fault divorce. Having a negative effect on the family and fertility rates
What conceivable benefit would you expect to acru from restricting divorce? Couples stuck in loveless marriages are not likely to bring children into them and if they did it would be for entirely the wrong reasons to the detriment of everyone.
Unless it was an arranged marriage no marriage would be loveless otherwise they would never have got married in the first place.
No marriage is perfect, you work through the downs and arguments as well as the ups
What a naive view.
Love sometimes lasts, but love sometimes dies. At which point it becomes loveless.
Go through ups and downs, yes, my wife and I have had ups and downs and we still love each other. That is a healthy marriage.
If you only have downs and the love is gone, then it's not a healthy marriage and it should be terminated.
All my biological grandparents divorced. Both my dad's parents remarried before I was even born and had a happy, healthy second marriage that took them to the end of their lives. Them divorcing and remarrying was the best thing that ever happened to them, and the family as a whole.
I was also lucky enough then to grow up with 5 grandparents (3 biological, 2 not) and am fortunate still have the two non-biological grandparents whom I love as my grandparents every bit as much as the biological ones.
My father's parents divorced and it had a negative impact on his teenage years and hit his mother hard while his father remarried.
Divorce is simply too easy nowadays, unless there is adultery or domestic violence involved divorce should be an absolute last resort and best avoided
My mother got a divorce in the late 1960's. It was incredibly difficult and took an absolute age, being one of the reasons the Denning Reforms came about. My father was a serial philanderer and he walked out the family home just after my sister was born in 1962. There was no fault on my mother's part. He was finally forced by the courts to pay maintenance in the princely sum of £4 a week. But the marriage still could not be ended for an age longer.
Allowing my mother to escape being trapped in a marriage was no "last resort"; splitting from him was not "best avoided", as for one thing it would have prevented her getting another successful, joyous marriage to my stepfather. The strain of the broken relationship and the attempts to get a divorce caused her to have several nervous breakdowns. No child should have had to endure seeing their parent go through ECT.
Your world view is so constrained. It would result in so much pain for others if rigidly adopted.
I have already said I don't oppose divorce on the grounds of adultery, even Jesus did not oppose divorce when one party had committed sexual immorality and cheated on the other.
That is not the same as supporting no fault divorce though, which I oppose even though it is now legal in the UK
"Sorry, kids, me and yer dad can't split up, even though we hate each other because some bloke called Jesus, who may or may not have existed 2000 years ago, wouldn't like it and the government don't like it very much, either, so we'll just stay together and make your life a misery until you're old enough to leave home" That's right?
If you clearly hated each other you would never have married in the first place. Most kids want both their parents at home with them
1 - People change 2 - Sometimes, especially when young and full of hormones, we make bad decisions 3 - Information that wasn't known beforehand can come to light
Your stance rejects all of the above. My mother is twice divorced. Anathema to you. For her first marriage, she fell deeply in love. A year or two down the line, her husband was diagnosed with schizophrenia. They had one daughter by then, but decided to divorce when, in the middle of an episode, he threatened the baby.
For her second marriage, she married "on the rebound." Partly because she was now used to being away from her over-controlling mother. She and my father had very different personalities - which they found out. Unfortunately, after the marriage. After several years of trying their best to make it work (and two children), they agreed to divorce.
To be honest, their divorce was the best thing they could have done for the children (me included). Rather than grow up in an air of mutual resentment and "making the best of it" through clenched teeth, we grew up in a home of love, learning, and laughter. Mum and Dad got on much better after the divorce and when they could live separately and when they didn't have to be in each other's business all the time. I actually think it was that which may have led to my sister and I both being in stable long-term marriages (her for 30 years+ at this point, me approaching 25 years). We didn't have the experience of the resentment we would doubtless have had in that alternate universe.
I reject entirely your didactic and unempathic stance.
Yes empathy is only uber liberalism, everyone else is evil and beyond the pale. Marriage, commitment of both parents to raising children, the nation's fertility rate, all irrelevant in comparison to the desires of the self first.
Well tough, I represent an argument millions agree with, especially the religious and don't give a shit whether you dislike me making it or not I will continue to do so
You represent an argument that was rejected 70 years ago and continues to be rejected since.
Far from it, Italy has recently elected a government with a more traditional view of women and the family, the US has also just elected a President and Congress with a more traditional view of the family.
The backlash against wokeism and uber liberalism has begun
Wrong.
America has just elected a twice divorced, repeatedly unfaithful adulterer as President.
Not a traditional view of the family.
And Giorgia Meloni has had a kid out of wedlock. Not exactly a bastion of religious morality.
One of the curiosities of right-populism is how many of its leaders don't reflect the values their rhetoric espouses. There's a definite lack of Corbyn/Livingstone like figures- even when their views were odd/wrong, they did sort of try to live by them.
Not that curious. There's a simple explanation.
Neither the leaders nor the voters give the slightest damn about Biblical values. HYUFD shows his contempt for the teaching of Jesus on a daily basis.
All they care about is cherrypicking elements they care about and then telling other people what they can and can't do.
Rubbish, Jesus was not a communist woke social liberal
For his day he bloody well was.
Overturning the money tables and the whole eye of the needle thing. Wanting to feed the hungry, help the poor, heal the sick.
He was incredibly woke for his era.
Wokeism is ultra pro LGBTQ+, pro division on race and sexuality lines with a particular rejection of white heterosexual male 'privilege' and uber feminist (albeit with some clash with them and the equally woke uber trans).
It is perfectly possible for big corporations to be very woke and many now are and for a poor man to be socially conservative and anti woke. Hence Harris won lots of executives from the former and Trump lots of the latter
I would seriously recommend you and and chill for a bit offline. You used to be a fairly mainstream Tory, but this culture war stuff from you is getting increasingly strange.
Jesus was clear that the route to heaven was not via the rules and traditions of the Pharisees but rather via compassion and charity to the least in society.
On personal morality his most pertinent point when stopping a stoning of an adulteress was "let him who is without sin cast the first stone".
I think it is incorrect and blasphemous to claim Jesus for any political party or view. His Kingdom is not of this world.
If Christianity and its Churches were more like you and Jesus, and less like HYUFD and Paul, I'd respect it a lot more.
Christians are still humans, they are just Christian ones. In most cases, following the example of Christ leads to living a life with a greater element of giving and social responsibility, but it doesn't transform you into an angel.
A significant problem is that far too many Christians do not try to follow the example of Christ, and instead pick the bits out of his life and the bible that allow them to live their lives as they want. Which Christ may not have approved of.
I'm really at the stage where I do wonder if organised religion has caused far more harm to the world than it has caused good.
If you have the statistics to support this view, I am interested to read them. Everything that I have read indicates that on average, Christians are far likelier to engage in charitable and other positive social activity than their non-Christian counterparts.
I also think that there's a huge trend in popular media to demonise Christianity, in ways both clearly stated (evil Christian characters) and indicated (evil characters in fantasy or pre-Christian settings but who demonstrate clear Christian traits), and this does colour views, especially when you don't really have your guard up against what is basically propaganda.
No statistics. But I would point you to our very own HYUFD as an example of someone who wants more wrong done in the world. As this thread shows.
"especially when you don't really have your guard up against what is basically propaganda."
Ahem. *you* said that????
Propaganda can come in the form of misinformation, but it can also come in the form of negative portrayals of a target group in popular drama - something discovered by the Germans when they created Jud Suss, a drama that featured an evil Jew, which was enormously more successful than their previous attempts at propaganda film documentaries portraying Jews as rats, which had been counterproductive. Similar portrayals of Christians are everywhere in popular culture.
I can't think of any such portrayals of Christians in popular culture, which is unsurprising given that Christians are a major consumer of pop culture and people don't like pissing off their customers.
What I do see is such Christians in real life, such as HYUFD of this parish.
Most pop-culture references to Christianity are gently jovial than outright nasty portrayals. And atheists tend to have equally jovial references too.
EG this exchange between the very atheist Sheldon Cooper and his very religious mother after he accidentally sees his mother engaged in coitus outside of wedlock.
Sheldon Cooper : I think what bothers me the most is the hypocrisy. Doesn't this contradict all the religious rules you've been expounding your whole life?
Mary Cooper : You're right, it does. And it is something I have been struggling with these days.
Sheldon Cooper : Then why are you doing it?
Mary Cooper : Because I'm not perfect, Shelly, and that man's booty is.
Sheldon Cooper : Well, this is confusing for me. But I don't want to stand in the way of your happiness so I'll condemn you internally while maintaining an outward appearance of acceptance.
Mary Cooper : That is very Christian of you.
I'm not really surprised, because you are the sort of mark who would simply assimilate such material without giving it any thought, except to grow a bit more strident in your anti-Christian diatribes.
A random example of the explicit form would be the dramatisations of The Handmaid's Tale - but there are too many to even mention. Any explicitly Christian character in popular media is destined to turn out to be a hypocrite philanderer at best and an axe murderer at worst.
A random example of the implicit form would be from the film Clash of the Titans, where a proto-Christian sect led by a form of prophet attempts to sacrifice Princess Andromeda to the Kracken. Or in 300, where the Persian King Xerxes (I could have that name wrong) asks the disabled character to 'kneel' before him as part of an extended allegory on Christianity vs. pagan religions. Or in series one of Game of Thrones, there's a portrayal of a sect that follows 'a good shepherd', curing the body of a tribal King but seeming to steal his soul. They all end up being burned to death afaicr. You can have a good giggle at these examples, but should you adopt a more thoughtful approach and rewatch the clips, you'll see I'm right.
Oh what a pathetic snowflake you are.
None of those are remotely comparable to Germans portraying Jews as rats.
You can have a giggle at anyone and everyone, pick any category ever, including atheists, and there will be examples of people having a giggle at them, as there absolutely should be.
It is unhealthy not to have a sense of humour or self-deprecation.
I am not saying that they are remotely comparable to the Germans portraying jews as rats - they did this in The Eternal Jew, a documentary featuring stock footage of rats, which as I've said, was incredibly unpopular, making ladies faint in the cinema. The Germans then decided to stick to far more insidious portrayals within rip-roaring entertainment blockbusters, like Jud Suss, which was far more successful, and is very similar to the way Christians are portrayed by in popular drama these days: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jud_Süß
Christians are not portrayed more critically in popular dramas than anyone else.
Simply not true, and despite your vehement denials, you'll notice it now, so enjoy.
I lean in favour of assisted dying, but don't have a strong view.
Of course, one can take one's stance from our moral leaders - any proposed reform that churches oppose, from ending the burning of witches and heretics to legalising divorce to more or less anything Mrs Thatcher did, is usually an excellent idea.
Divorce laws in the UK are too liberal now with no fault divorce. Having a negative effect on the family and fertility rates
What conceivable benefit would you expect to acru from restricting divorce? Couples stuck in loveless marriages are not likely to bring children into them and if they did it would be for entirely the wrong reasons to the detriment of everyone.
Unless it was an arranged marriage no marriage would be loveless otherwise they would never have got married in the first place.
No marriage is perfect, you work through the downs and arguments as well as the ups
What a naive view.
Love sometimes lasts, but love sometimes dies. At which point it becomes loveless.
Go through ups and downs, yes, my wife and I have had ups and downs and we still love each other. That is a healthy marriage.
If you only have downs and the love is gone, then it's not a healthy marriage and it should be terminated.
All my biological grandparents divorced. Both my dad's parents remarried before I was even born and had a happy, healthy second marriage that took them to the end of their lives. Them divorcing and remarrying was the best thing that ever happened to them, and the family as a whole.
I was also lucky enough then to grow up with 5 grandparents (3 biological, 2 not) and am fortunate still have the two non-biological grandparents whom I love as my grandparents every bit as much as the biological ones.
My father's parents divorced and it had a negative impact on his teenage years and hit his mother hard while his father remarried.
Divorce is simply too easy nowadays, unless there is adultery or domestic violence involved divorce should be an absolute last resort and best avoided
My mother got a divorce in the late 1960's. It was incredibly difficult and took an absolute age, being one of the reasons the Denning Reforms came about. My father was a serial philanderer and he walked out the family home just after my sister was born in 1962. There was no fault on my mother's part. He was finally forced by the courts to pay maintenance in the princely sum of £4 a week. But the marriage still could not be ended for an age longer.
Allowing my mother to escape being trapped in a marriage was no "last resort"; splitting from him was not "best avoided", as for one thing it would have prevented her getting another successful, joyous marriage to my stepfather. The strain of the broken relationship and the attempts to get a divorce caused her to have several nervous breakdowns. No child should have had to endure seeing their parent go through ECT.
Your world view is so constrained. It would result in so much pain for others if rigidly adopted.
I have already said I don't oppose divorce on the grounds of adultery, even Jesus did not oppose divorce when one party had committed sexual immorality and cheated on the other.
That is not the same as supporting no fault divorce though, which I oppose even though it is now legal in the UK
"Sorry, kids, me and yer dad can't split up, even though we hate each other because some bloke called Jesus, who may or may not have existed 2000 years ago, wouldn't like it and the government don't like it very much, either, so we'll just stay together and make your life a misery until you're old enough to leave home" That's right?
If you clearly hated each other you would never have married in the first place. Most kids want both their parents at home with them
1 - People change 2 - Sometimes, especially when young and full of hormones, we make bad decisions 3 - Information that wasn't known beforehand can come to light
Your stance rejects all of the above. My mother is twice divorced. Anathema to you. For her first marriage, she fell deeply in love. A year or two down the line, her husband was diagnosed with schizophrenia. They had one daughter by then, but decided to divorce when, in the middle of an episode, he threatened the baby.
For her second marriage, she married "on the rebound." Partly because she was now used to being away from her over-controlling mother. She and my father had very different personalities - which they found out. Unfortunately, after the marriage. After several years of trying their best to make it work (and two children), they agreed to divorce.
To be honest, their divorce was the best thing they could have done for the children (me included). Rather than grow up in an air of mutual resentment and "making the best of it" through clenched teeth, we grew up in a home of love, learning, and laughter. Mum and Dad got on much better after the divorce and when they could live separately and when they didn't have to be in each other's business all the time. I actually think it was that which may have led to my sister and I both being in stable long-term marriages (her for 30 years+ at this point, me approaching 25 years). We didn't have the experience of the resentment we would doubtless have had in that alternate universe.
I reject entirely your didactic and unempathic stance.
Yes empathy is only uber liberalism, everyone else is evil and beyond the pale. Marriage, commitment of both parents to raising children, the nation's fertility rate, all irrelevant in comparison to the desires of the self first.
Well tough, I represent an argument millions agree with, especially the religious and don't give a shit whether you dislike me making it or not I will continue to do so
You represent an argument that was rejected 70 years ago and continues to be rejected since.
Far from it, Italy has recently elected a government with a more traditional view of women and the family, the US has also just elected a President and Congress with a more traditional view of the family.
The backlash against wokeism and uber liberalism has begun
Wrong.
America has just elected a twice divorced, repeatedly unfaithful adulterer as President.
Not a traditional view of the family.
And Giorgia Meloni has had a kid out of wedlock. Not exactly a bastion of religious morality.
One of the curiosities of right-populism is how many of its leaders don't reflect the values their rhetoric espouses. There's a definite lack of Corbyn/Livingstone like figures- even when their views were odd/wrong, they did sort of try to live by them.
Not that curious. There's a simple explanation.
Neither the leaders nor the voters give the slightest damn about Biblical values. HYUFD shows his contempt for the teaching of Jesus on a daily basis.
All they care about is cherrypicking elements they care about and then telling other people what they can and can't do.
Rubbish, Jesus was not a communist woke social liberal
For his day he bloody well was.
Overturning the money tables and the whole eye of the needle thing. Wanting to feed the hungry, help the poor, heal the sick.
He was incredibly woke for his era.
Wokeism is ultra pro LGBTQ+, pro division on race and sexuality lines with a particular rejection of white heterosexual male 'privilege' and uber feminist (albeit with some clash with them and the equally woke uber trans).
It is perfectly possible for big corporations to be very woke and many now are and for a poor man to be socially conservative and anti woke. Hence Harris won lots of executives from the former and Trump lots of the latter
I would seriously recommend you and and chill for a bit offline. You used to be a fairly mainstream Tory, but this culture war stuff from you is getting increasingly strange.
Jesus was clear that the route to heaven was not via the rules and traditions of the Pharisees but rather via compassion and charity to the least in society.
On personal morality his most pertinent point when stopping a stoning of an adulteress was "let him who is without sin cast the first stone".
I think it is incorrect and blasphemous to claim Jesus for any political party or view. His Kingdom is not of this world.
If Christianity and its Churches were more like you and Jesus, and less like HYUFD and Paul, I'd respect it a lot more.
Christians are still humans, they are just Christian ones. In most cases, following the example of Christ leads to living a life with a greater element of giving and social responsibility, but it doesn't transform you into an angel.
A significant problem is that far too many Christians do not try to follow the example of Christ, and instead pick the bits out of his life and the bible that allow them to live their lives as they want. Which Christ may not have approved of.
I'm really at the stage where I do wonder if organised religion has caused far more harm to the world than it has caused good.
If you have the statistics to support this view, I am interested to read them. Everything that I have read indicates that on average, Christians are far likelier to engage in charitable and other positive social activity than their non-Christian counterparts.
I also think that there's a huge trend in popular media to demonise Christianity, in ways both clearly stated (evil Christian characters) and indicated (evil characters in fantasy or pre-Christian settings but who demonstrate clear Christian traits), and this does colour views, especially when you don't really have your guard up against what is basically propaganda.
No statistics. But I would point you to our very own HYUFD as an example of someone who wants more wrong done in the world. As this thread shows.
"especially when you don't really have your guard up against what is basically propaganda."
Ahem. *you* said that????
Propaganda can come in the form of misinformation, but it can also come in the form of negative portrayals of a target group in popular drama - something discovered by the Germans when they created Jud Suss, a drama that featured an evil Jew, which was enormously more successful than their previous attempts at propaganda film documentaries portraying Jews as rats, which had been counterproductive. Similar portrayals of Christians are everywhere in popular culture.
I can't think of any such portrayals of Christians in popular culture, which is unsurprising given that Christians are a major consumer of pop culture and people don't like pissing off their customers.
What I do see is such Christians in real life, such as HYUFD of this parish.
Most pop-culture references to Christianity are gently jovial than outright nasty portrayals. And atheists tend to have equally jovial references too.
EG this exchange between the very atheist Sheldon Cooper and his very religious mother after he accidentally sees his mother engaged in coitus outside of wedlock.
Sheldon Cooper : I think what bothers me the most is the hypocrisy. Doesn't this contradict all the religious rules you've been expounding your whole life?
Mary Cooper : You're right, it does. And it is something I have been struggling with these days.
Sheldon Cooper : Then why are you doing it?
Mary Cooper : Because I'm not perfect, Shelly, and that man's booty is.
Sheldon Cooper : Well, this is confusing for me. But I don't want to stand in the way of your happiness so I'll condemn you internally while maintaining an outward appearance of acceptance.
Mary Cooper : That is very Christian of you.
I'm not really surprised, because you are the sort of mark who would simply assimilate such material without giving it any thought, except to grow a bit more strident in your anti-Christian diatribes.
A random example of the explicit form would be the dramatisations of The Handmaid's Tale - but there are too many to even mention. Any explicitly Christian character in popular media is destined to turn out to be a hypocrite philanderer at best and an axe murderer at worst.
A random example of the implicit form would be from the film Clash of the Titans, where a proto-Christian sect led by a form of prophet attempts to sacrifice Princess Andromeda to the Kracken. Or in 300, where the Persian King Xerxes (I could have that name wrong) asks the disabled character to 'kneel' before him as part of an extended allegory on Christianity vs. pagan religions. Or in series one of Game of Thrones, there's a portrayal of a sect that follows 'a good shepherd', curing the body of a tribal King but seeming to steal his soul. They all end up being burned to death afaicr. You can have a good giggle at these examples, but should you adopt a more thoughtful approach and rewatch the clips, you'll see I'm right.
Oh what a pathetic snowflake you are.
None of those are remotely comparable to Germans portraying Jews as rats.
You can have a giggle at anyone and everyone, pick any category ever, including atheists, and there will be examples of people having a giggle at them, as there absolutely should be.
It is unhealthy not to have a sense of humour or self-deprecation.
I am not saying that they are remotely comparable to the Germans portraying jews as rats - they did this in The Eternal Jew, a documentary featuring stock footage of rats, which as I've said, was incredibly unpopular, making ladies faint in the cinema. The Germans then decided to stick to far more insidious portrayals within rip-roaring entertainment blockbusters, like Jud Suss, which was far more successful, and is very similar to the way Christians are portrayed by in popular drama these days: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jud_Süß
Christians are not portrayed more critically in popular dramas than anyone else.
Simply not true, and despite your vehement denials, you'll notice it now, so enjoy.
Perfectly true.
Snowflakes like you are like Isaac Hayes who was perfectly happy to work on a show that ruthlessly mocked anyone and everyone until his own religion was the butt of the joke.
You have a pathetic list of implied digs, that you make tenuous straw grasping links on, while ignoring the fact that everyone is the subject to digs sometimes.
It is unhealthy not to be. Anyone never mocked would not be in a good place.
I lean in favour of assisted dying, but don't have a strong view.
Of course, one can take one's stance from our moral leaders - any proposed reform that churches oppose, from ending the burning of witches and heretics to legalising divorce to more or less anything Mrs Thatcher did, is usually an excellent idea.
Divorce laws in the UK are too liberal now with no fault divorce. Having a negative effect on the family and fertility rates
What conceivable benefit would you expect to acru from restricting divorce? Couples stuck in loveless marriages are not likely to bring children into them and if they did it would be for entirely the wrong reasons to the detriment of everyone.
Unless it was an arranged marriage no marriage would be loveless otherwise they would never have got married in the first place.
No marriage is perfect, you work through the downs and arguments as well as the ups
What a naive view.
Love sometimes lasts, but love sometimes dies. At which point it becomes loveless.
Go through ups and downs, yes, my wife and I have had ups and downs and we still love each other. That is a healthy marriage.
If you only have downs and the love is gone, then it's not a healthy marriage and it should be terminated.
All my biological grandparents divorced. Both my dad's parents remarried before I was even born and had a happy, healthy second marriage that took them to the end of their lives. Them divorcing and remarrying was the best thing that ever happened to them, and the family as a whole.
I was also lucky enough then to grow up with 5 grandparents (3 biological, 2 not) and am fortunate still have the two non-biological grandparents whom I love as my grandparents every bit as much as the biological ones.
My father's parents divorced and it had a negative impact on his teenage years and hit his mother hard while his father remarried.
Divorce is simply too easy nowadays, unless there is adultery or domestic violence involved divorce should be an absolute last resort and best avoided
My mother got a divorce in the late 1960's. It was incredibly difficult and took an absolute age, being one of the reasons the Denning Reforms came about. My father was a serial philanderer and he walked out the family home just after my sister was born in 1962. There was no fault on my mother's part. He was finally forced by the courts to pay maintenance in the princely sum of £4 a week. But the marriage still could not be ended for an age longer.
Allowing my mother to escape being trapped in a marriage was no "last resort"; splitting from him was not "best avoided", as for one thing it would have prevented her getting another successful, joyous marriage to my stepfather. The strain of the broken relationship and the attempts to get a divorce caused her to have several nervous breakdowns. No child should have had to endure seeing their parent go through ECT.
Your world view is so constrained. It would result in so much pain for others if rigidly adopted.
I have already said I don't oppose divorce on the grounds of adultery, even Jesus did not oppose divorce when one party had committed sexual immorality and cheated on the other.
That is not the same as supporting no fault divorce though, which I oppose even though it is now legal in the UK
"Sorry, kids, me and yer dad can't split up, even though we hate each other because some bloke called Jesus, who may or may not have existed 2000 years ago, wouldn't like it and the government don't like it very much, either, so we'll just stay together and make your life a misery until you're old enough to leave home" That's right?
If you clearly hated each other you would never have married in the first place. Most kids want both their parents at home with them
1 - People change 2 - Sometimes, especially when young and full of hormones, we make bad decisions 3 - Information that wasn't known beforehand can come to light
Your stance rejects all of the above. My mother is twice divorced. Anathema to you. For her first marriage, she fell deeply in love. A year or two down the line, her husband was diagnosed with schizophrenia. They had one daughter by then, but decided to divorce when, in the middle of an episode, he threatened the baby.
For her second marriage, she married "on the rebound." Partly because she was now used to being away from her over-controlling mother. She and my father had very different personalities - which they found out. Unfortunately, after the marriage. After several years of trying their best to make it work (and two children), they agreed to divorce.
To be honest, their divorce was the best thing they could have done for the children (me included). Rather than grow up in an air of mutual resentment and "making the best of it" through clenched teeth, we grew up in a home of love, learning, and laughter. Mum and Dad got on much better after the divorce and when they could live separately and when they didn't have to be in each other's business all the time. I actually think it was that which may have led to my sister and I both being in stable long-term marriages (her for 30 years+ at this point, me approaching 25 years). We didn't have the experience of the resentment we would doubtless have had in that alternate universe.
I reject entirely your didactic and unempathic stance.
Yes empathy is only uber liberalism, everyone else is evil and beyond the pale. Marriage, commitment of both parents to raising children, the nation's fertility rate, all irrelevant in comparison to the desires of the self first.
Well tough, I represent an argument millions agree with, especially the religious and don't give a shit whether you dislike me making it or not I will continue to do so
You represent an argument that was rejected 70 years ago and continues to be rejected since.
Far from it, Italy has recently elected a government with a more traditional view of women and the family, the US has also just elected a President and Congress with a more traditional view of the family.
The backlash against wokeism and uber liberalism has begun
Wrong.
America has just elected a twice divorced, repeatedly unfaithful adulterer as President.
Not a traditional view of the family.
And Giorgia Meloni has had a kid out of wedlock. Not exactly a bastion of religious morality.
One of the curiosities of right-populism is how many of its leaders don't reflect the values their rhetoric espouses. There's a definite lack of Corbyn/Livingstone like figures- even when their views were odd/wrong, they did sort of try to live by them.
Not that curious. There's a simple explanation.
Neither the leaders nor the voters give the slightest damn about Biblical values. HYUFD shows his contempt for the teaching of Jesus on a daily basis.
All they care about is cherrypicking elements they care about and then telling other people what they can and can't do.
Rubbish, Jesus was not a communist woke social liberal
For his day he bloody well was.
Overturning the money tables and the whole eye of the needle thing. Wanting to feed the hungry, help the poor, heal the sick.
He was incredibly woke for his era.
Wokeism is ultra pro LGBTQ+, pro division on race and sexuality lines with a particular rejection of white heterosexual male 'privilege' and uber feminist (albeit with some clash with them and the equally woke uber trans).
It is perfectly possible for big corporations to be very woke and many now are and for a poor man to be socially conservative and anti woke. Hence Harris won lots of executives from the former and Trump lots of the latter
I would seriously recommend you and and chill for a bit offline. You used to be a fairly mainstream Tory, but this culture war stuff from you is getting increasingly strange.
Jesus was clear that the route to heaven was not via the rules and traditions of the Pharisees but rather via compassion and charity to the least in society.
On personal morality his most pertinent point when stopping a stoning of an adulteress was "let him who is without sin cast the first stone".
I think it is incorrect and blasphemous to claim Jesus for any political party or view. His Kingdom is not of this world.
If Christianity and its Churches were more like you and Jesus, and less like HYUFD and Paul, I'd respect it a lot more.
Christians are still humans, they are just Christian ones. In most cases, following the example of Christ leads to living a life with a greater element of giving and social responsibility, but it doesn't transform you into an angel.
A significant problem is that far too many Christians do not try to follow the example of Christ, and instead pick the bits out of his life and the bible that allow them to live their lives as they want. Which Christ may not have approved of.
I'm really at the stage where I do wonder if organised religion has caused far more harm to the world than it has caused good.
If you have the statistics to support this view, I am interested to read them. Everything that I have read indicates that on average, Christians are far likelier to engage in charitable and other positive social activity than their non-Christian counterparts.
I also think that there's a huge trend in popular media to demonise Christianity, in ways both clearly stated (evil Christian characters) and indicated (evil characters in fantasy or pre-Christian settings but who demonstrate clear Christian traits), and this does colour views, especially when you don't really have your guard up against what is basically propaganda.
No statistics. But I would point you to our very own HYUFD as an example of someone who wants more wrong done in the world. As this thread shows.
"especially when you don't really have your guard up against what is basically propaganda."
Ahem. *you* said that????
Propaganda can come in the form of misinformation, but it can also come in the form of negative portrayals of a target group in popular drama - something discovered by the Germans when they created Jud Suss, a drama that featured an evil Jew, which was enormously more successful than their previous attempts at propaganda film documentaries portraying Jews as rats, which had been counterproductive. Similar portrayals of Christians are everywhere in popular culture.
I can't think of any such portrayals of Christians in popular culture, which is unsurprising given that Christians are a major consumer of pop culture and people don't like pissing off their customers.
What I do see is such Christians in real life, such as HYUFD of this parish.
Most pop-culture references to Christianity are gently jovial than outright nasty portrayals. And atheists tend to have equally jovial references too.
EG this exchange between the very atheist Sheldon Cooper and his very religious mother after he accidentally sees his mother engaged in coitus outside of wedlock.
Sheldon Cooper : I think what bothers me the most is the hypocrisy. Doesn't this contradict all the religious rules you've been expounding your whole life?
Mary Cooper : You're right, it does. And it is something I have been struggling with these days.
Sheldon Cooper : Then why are you doing it?
Mary Cooper : Because I'm not perfect, Shelly, and that man's booty is.
Sheldon Cooper : Well, this is confusing for me. But I don't want to stand in the way of your happiness so I'll condemn you internally while maintaining an outward appearance of acceptance.
Mary Cooper : That is very Christian of you.
I'm not really surprised, because you are the sort of mark who would simply assimilate such material without giving it any thought, except to grow a bit more strident in your anti-Christian diatribes.
A random example of the explicit form would be the dramatisations of The Handmaid's Tale - but there are too many to even mention. Any explicitly Christian character in popular media is destined to turn out to be a hypocrite philanderer at best and an axe murderer at worst.
A random example of the implicit form would be from the film Clash of the Titans, where a proto-Christian sect led by a form of prophet attempts to sacrifice Princess Andromeda to the Kracken. Or in 300, where the Persian King Xerxes (I could have that name wrong) asks the disabled character to 'kneel' before him as part of an extended allegory on Christianity vs. pagan religions. Or in series one of Game of Thrones, there's a portrayal of a sect that follows 'a good shepherd', curing the body of a tribal King but seeming to steal his soul. They all end up being burned to death afaicr. You can have a good giggle at these examples, but should you adopt a more thoughtful approach and rewatch the clips, you'll see I'm right.
Oh what a pathetic snowflake you are.
None of those are remotely comparable to Germans portraying Jews as rats.
You can have a giggle at anyone and everyone, pick any category ever, including atheists, and there will be examples of people having a giggle at them, as there absolutely should be.
It is unhealthy not to have a sense of humour or self-deprecation.
I am not saying that they are remotely comparable to the Germans portraying jews as rats - they did this in The Eternal Jew, a documentary featuring stock footage of rats, which as I've said, was incredibly unpopular, making ladies faint in the cinema. The Germans then decided to stick to far more insidious portrayals within rip-roaring entertainment blockbusters, like Jud Suss, which was far more successful, and is very similar to the way Christians are portrayed in popular drama these days: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jud_Süß
You don't half talk shit on occasion. The examples you give are portrayals of fundamentalist religion. Which is entirely deserving of such portrayal, whether 'Christian' (which it clearly isn't in two of the ones you give), or otherwise.
The People's Vote petition demanding a Second Election has reached a million signatures.
Good news. There will be one. It may not be until July 2029, but there will certainly be one.
Even better news, it will be the UK's 59th election not its second.
You'd have thought we'd be good at them by now. Yet we elect the Conservatives most of the time.
The problem is that the Conservatives are just too welcoming so they suck up all the political talent.
The Conservatives at their best are a broad church welcoming everyone centre right. Atheists, republicans and others can sit alongside traditional conservatives in the party. Normally.
Labour at its worst is more dominated by the "moral crusade or nothing" philosophy so are less welcoming to contradictory viewpoints.
There are noteworthy exceptions to this. Especially on the site.
You can't be an atheist and a republican and be a Tory, it is logically impossible. You could just about be a libertarian rightwinger in Reform but that is it.
Just as you can't be in Labour and want to privatise the NHS and most public services, it is logically impossible.
There are limits to how broad church our main parties can be
Another example of a serious economic issue for the UK, for which a non partisan solution is desperately needed.
How long does it take to build a mile of tramway?
https://www.samdumitriu.com/p/how-long-does-it-take-to-build-a Birmingham is right now building a mile long extension to the West Midlands Metro, which will end up taking 13 years in total from the initial proposal to the first trams operating. More than six years were spent in the planning process. This isn’t atypical either, tram construction experts we’ve spoken to have said that schemes in the UK take more than a decade to get built.
Countries that build trams cheaper, tend to also approve and build them faster. Dijon, France built their 12 mile tramway network in just two years, after two years of planning. Dijon’s tramway cost just £38m per mile. Birmingham’s cost six times more at £233m per mile. ..
It's not just trams.
Trams, roads, rails, houses, prisons, factories, power supply and every other dammed thing.
Our planning system is broken and not fit for purpose.
Hence "another example". I genuinely think we could add at least a couple of percent to GDP just by sorting this.
Politically hard to force through, but economically, it ought to be an easy win.
Although if you look at the case of the Derby incinerator I showed earlier, the planning process repeatedly rejected it, before appeals to the High Court eventually reversed the decision. Given that the project was utterly stupid, I'd argue the planning process got it correct, and it would have saved Derbeians many tens of millions.
(Though I don't know if the reasons the planners rejected it were related to the reasons it failed, or due to base NIMBYism. It is easy to be right for the wrong reasons.)
The largest number of foodbanks in the U.K., from any single organisation, are led by the Trussell Trust, an Anglican charity.
When i was in Southern Italy a few years ago at the height of their economic crisis, the only people left locally with any interest to feed the hungry were the Catholic Church.
That may be true. But given what Welby has just resigned for, I might suggest that there is also a massive amount of harm done by organised churches as well. Yes, that was just one case: but it's perfectly possible to point to many, many more, including some organised by a church on a massive scale. e.g. Magdalene Laundries.
And the CofE mortgage schemes were utterly exploitative of their clergy. Shame on them.
There were also sexual abuse scandals in the BBC, paedophiles in boarding schools, the Scouts and youth football clubs and sex abusers in Hollywood and even Harrods and Parliament and the City.
It is no surprise those who want to carry out sexual abuse are attracted to areas of establishment status or wealth and paedophiles are attracted to jobs which give them access to children.
However safeguarding checks including in the Church are massively better than they were in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s and 1990s when most of these incidents occurred and we now have the DBS too
The incidents Weldby resigned for are much more recent.
I agree that people who want to abuse other people (and it is not just sexual abuse) will try to get into positions of power. The problem is that time and time again, church after church just covers it up. Often, moving priests onto other parishes so they can just resume their behaviour.
Or the behaviour was even sanctioned by the church.
They aren't, Smyth's abuse was committed in the 1980s and 1990s and he wasn't even a priest, they took place on Christian camps, he was a barrister by trade.
Now priests have to go through multiple safeguarding and DBS checks to get Parish posts
And AIUI the church was told back in the 1980s, and the warnings were ignored.
"It also highlighted how evidence of crimes had been gathered in the 1980s but was suppressed, including details of children being physically and sexually abused. ... "The scale and severity of the practice was horrific," noted the so-called Ruston report, named after the Rev Mark Ruston, who compiled it in 1982." (1)
You are excusing the inexcusable. The churches are not interested in morality or people; they are interested in power and money. Individuals within may be good, moral people; but the entire stinking edifices they work within are rotten.
I am agnostic. I like the idea of God, and I often pray. I try to live my life according to a morality that is informed by Christianity. But the reason I don't join a church?
You could equally say BBC managers turned a blind eye to abuse by the likes of Savile, or boarding school heads turned blind eyes to abuse committed by some of their teachers or even the leadership of the Liberal Party turned a blind eye to evidence of abuse by Cyril Smith or the leadership of Harrods ignored evidence of Al Fayed's abuse. It was the culture of the time and pre the DBS and safeguarding era.
Not that I am particularly devastated I don't have to endure your left liberal sanctimoniousness in any church near me
Every day I learn something new on PB. Today, I learnt that Jesus was a carpenter, and not a welfare claimant. I'm astonished.
Actually his earthly “dad” (whose trade he followed) was a builder. And apparently moderately prosperous. Hence the schooling for the kid. Which would have been paid for.
So he was inline to inherit a family business, and privately educated.
Wonder what rate of IHT applied?
Jesus had at least 4 brothers (according to Mark 6.3) so if the business was worth a bit, Joseph would have shared out the business among them so that the shares of each partner were within the IHT limit. However tradition (and some evidence from silence) suggests Joseph may have died young, thus exemplifying the dangers of the 7 year rule.
But Jesus' apparent indifference to the family business is a nice example of why older business people and farmers hate doing this - the young might get religion and start wasting assets, giving assets away and stuff like that.
The People's Vote petition demanding a Second Election has reached a million signatures.
Good news. There will be one. It may not be until July 2029, but there will certainly be one.
Even better news, it will be the UK's 59th election not its second.
You'd have thought we'd be good at them by now. Yet we elect the Conservatives most of the time.
The problem is that the Conservatives are just too welcoming so they suck up all the political talent.
The Conservatives at their best are a broad church welcoming everyone centre right. Atheists, republicans and others can sit alongside traditional conservatives in the party. Normally.
Labour at its worst is more dominated by the "moral crusade or nothing" philosophy so are less welcoming to contradictory viewpoints.
There are noteworthy exceptions to this. Especially on the site.
You can't be an atheist and a republican and be a Tory, it is logically impossible. You could just about be a libertarian rightwinger in Reform but that is it.
Just as you can't be in Labour and want to privatise the NHS and most public services, it is logically impossible.
There are limits to how broad church our main parties can be
The Tory Party dissolved in the 19th Century.
You can be an atheist and a republican and a Conservative. There are many on this site and the Party has worked backwards to appeal to as many votes as possible for centuries.
I lean in favour of assisted dying, but don't have a strong view.
Of course, one can take one's stance from our moral leaders - any proposed reform that churches oppose, from ending the burning of witches and heretics to legalising divorce to more or less anything Mrs Thatcher did, is usually an excellent idea.
Divorce laws in the UK are too liberal now with no fault divorce. Having a negative effect on the family and fertility rates
What conceivable benefit would you expect to acru from restricting divorce? Couples stuck in loveless marriages are not likely to bring children into them and if they did it would be for entirely the wrong reasons to the detriment of everyone.
Unless it was an arranged marriage no marriage would be loveless otherwise they would never have got married in the first place.
No marriage is perfect, you work through the downs and arguments as well as the ups
What a naive view.
Love sometimes lasts, but love sometimes dies. At which point it becomes loveless.
Go through ups and downs, yes, my wife and I have had ups and downs and we still love each other. That is a healthy marriage.
If you only have downs and the love is gone, then it's not a healthy marriage and it should be terminated.
All my biological grandparents divorced. Both my dad's parents remarried before I was even born and had a happy, healthy second marriage that took them to the end of their lives. Them divorcing and remarrying was the best thing that ever happened to them, and the family as a whole.
I was also lucky enough then to grow up with 5 grandparents (3 biological, 2 not) and am fortunate still have the two non-biological grandparents whom I love as my grandparents every bit as much as the biological ones.
My father's parents divorced and it had a negative impact on his teenage years and hit his mother hard while his father remarried.
Divorce is simply too easy nowadays, unless there is adultery or domestic violence involved divorce should be an absolute last resort and best avoided
My mother got a divorce in the late 1960's. It was incredibly difficult and took an absolute age, being one of the reasons the Denning Reforms came about. My father was a serial philanderer and he walked out the family home just after my sister was born in 1962. There was no fault on my mother's part. He was finally forced by the courts to pay maintenance in the princely sum of £4 a week. But the marriage still could not be ended for an age longer.
Allowing my mother to escape being trapped in a marriage was no "last resort"; splitting from him was not "best avoided", as for one thing it would have prevented her getting another successful, joyous marriage to my stepfather. The strain of the broken relationship and the attempts to get a divorce caused her to have several nervous breakdowns. No child should have had to endure seeing their parent go through ECT.
Your world view is so constrained. It would result in so much pain for others if rigidly adopted.
I have already said I don't oppose divorce on the grounds of adultery, even Jesus did not oppose divorce when one party had committed sexual immorality and cheated on the other.
That is not the same as supporting no fault divorce though, which I oppose even though it is now legal in the UK
"Sorry, kids, me and yer dad can't split up, even though we hate each other because some bloke called Jesus, who may or may not have existed 2000 years ago, wouldn't like it and the government don't like it very much, either, so we'll just stay together and make your life a misery until you're old enough to leave home" That's right?
If you clearly hated each other you would never have married in the first place. Most kids want both their parents at home with them
1 - People change 2 - Sometimes, especially when young and full of hormones, we make bad decisions 3 - Information that wasn't known beforehand can come to light
Your stance rejects all of the above. My mother is twice divorced. Anathema to you. For her first marriage, she fell deeply in love. A year or two down the line, her husband was diagnosed with schizophrenia. They had one daughter by then, but decided to divorce when, in the middle of an episode, he threatened the baby.
For her second marriage, she married "on the rebound." Partly because she was now used to being away from her over-controlling mother. She and my father had very different personalities - which they found out. Unfortunately, after the marriage. After several years of trying their best to make it work (and two children), they agreed to divorce.
To be honest, their divorce was the best thing they could have done for the children (me included). Rather than grow up in an air of mutual resentment and "making the best of it" through clenched teeth, we grew up in a home of love, learning, and laughter. Mum and Dad got on much better after the divorce and when they could live separately and when they didn't have to be in each other's business all the time. I actually think it was that which may have led to my sister and I both being in stable long-term marriages (her for 30 years+ at this point, me approaching 25 years). We didn't have the experience of the resentment we would doubtless have had in that alternate universe.
I reject entirely your didactic and unempathic stance.
Yes empathy is only uber liberalism, everyone else is evil and beyond the pale. Marriage, commitment of both parents to raising children, the nation's fertility rate, all irrelevant in comparison to the desires of the self first.
Well tough, I represent an argument millions agree with, especially the religious and don't give a shit whether you dislike me making it or not I will continue to do so
You represent an argument that was rejected 70 years ago and continues to be rejected since.
Far from it, Italy has recently elected a government with a more traditional view of women and the family, the US has also just elected a President and Congress with a more traditional view of the family.
The backlash against wokeism and uber liberalism has begun
Wrong.
America has just elected a twice divorced, repeatedly unfaithful adulterer as President.
Not a traditional view of the family.
And Giorgia Meloni has had a kid out of wedlock. Not exactly a bastion of religious morality.
One of the curiosities of right-populism is how many of its leaders don't reflect the values their rhetoric espouses. There's a definite lack of Corbyn/Livingstone like figures- even when their views were odd/wrong, they did sort of try to live by them.
Not that curious. There's a simple explanation.
Neither the leaders nor the voters give the slightest damn about Biblical values. HYUFD shows his contempt for the teaching of Jesus on a daily basis.
All they care about is cherrypicking elements they care about and then telling other people what they can and can't do.
Rubbish, Jesus was not a communist woke social liberal
For his day he bloody well was.
Overturning the money tables and the whole eye of the needle thing. Wanting to feed the hungry, help the poor, heal the sick.
He was incredibly woke for his era.
Wokeism is ultra pro LGBTQ+, pro division on race and sexuality lines with a particular rejection of white heterosexual male 'privilege' and uber feminist (albeit with some clash with them and the equally woke uber trans).
It is perfectly possible for big corporations to be very woke and many now are and for a poor man to be socially conservative and anti woke. Hence Harris won lots of executives from the former and Trump lots of the latter
I would seriously recommend you and and chill for a bit offline. You used to be a fairly mainstream Tory, but this culture war stuff from you is getting increasingly strange.
Jesus was clear that the route to heaven was not via the rules and traditions of the Pharisees but rather via compassion and charity to the least in society.
On personal morality his most pertinent point when stopping a stoning of an adulteress was "let him who is without sin cast the first stone".
I think it is incorrect and blasphemous to claim Jesus for any political party or view. His Kingdom is not of this world.
If Christianity and its Churches were more like you and Jesus, and less like HYUFD and Paul, I'd respect it a lot more.
Christians are still humans, they are just Christian ones. In most cases, following the example of Christ leads to living a life with a greater element of giving and social responsibility, but it doesn't transform you into an angel.
A significant problem is that far too many Christians do not try to follow the example of Christ, and instead pick the bits out of his life and the bible that allow them to live their lives as they want. Which Christ may not have approved of.
I'm really at the stage where I do wonder if organised religion has caused far more harm to the world than it has caused good.
If you have the statistics to support this view, I am interested to read them. Everything that I have read indicates that on average, Christians are far likelier to engage in charitable and other positive social activity than their non-Christian counterparts.
I also think that there's a huge trend in popular media to demonise Christianity, in ways both clearly stated (evil Christian characters) and indicated (evil characters in fantasy or pre-Christian settings but who demonstrate clear Christian traits), and this does colour views, especially when you don't really have your guard up against what is basically propaganda.
No statistics. But I would point you to our very own HYUFD as an example of someone who wants more wrong done in the world. As this thread shows.
"especially when you don't really have your guard up against what is basically propaganda."
Ahem. *you* said that????
Propaganda can come in the form of misinformation, but it can also come in the form of negative portrayals of a target group in popular drama - something discovered by the Germans when they created Jud Suss, a drama that featured an evil Jew, which was enormously more successful than their previous attempts at propaganda film documentaries portraying Jews as rats, which had been counterproductive. Similar portrayals of Christians are everywhere in popular culture.
I can't think of any such portrayals of Christians in popular culture, which is unsurprising given that Christians are a major consumer of pop culture and people don't like pissing off their customers.
What I do see is such Christians in real life, such as HYUFD of this parish.
Most pop-culture references to Christianity are gently jovial than outright nasty portrayals. And atheists tend to have equally jovial references too.
EG this exchange between the very atheist Sheldon Cooper and his very religious mother after he accidentally sees his mother engaged in coitus outside of wedlock.
Sheldon Cooper : I think what bothers me the most is the hypocrisy. Doesn't this contradict all the religious rules you've been expounding your whole life?
Mary Cooper : You're right, it does. And it is something I have been struggling with these days.
Sheldon Cooper : Then why are you doing it?
Mary Cooper : Because I'm not perfect, Shelly, and that man's booty is.
Sheldon Cooper : Well, this is confusing for me. But I don't want to stand in the way of your happiness so I'll condemn you internally while maintaining an outward appearance of acceptance.
Mary Cooper : That is very Christian of you.
I'm not really surprised, because you are the sort of mark who would simply assimilate such material without giving it any thought, except to grow a bit more strident in your anti-Christian diatribes.
A random example of the explicit form would be the dramatisations of The Handmaid's Tale - but there are too many to even mention. Any explicitly Christian character in popular media is destined to turn out to be a hypocrite philanderer at best and an axe murderer at worst.
A random example of the implicit form would be from the film Clash of the Titans, where a proto-Christian sect led by a form of prophet attempts to sacrifice Princess Andromeda to the Kracken. Or in 300, where the Persian King Xerxes (I could have that name wrong) asks the disabled character to 'kneel' before him as part of an extended allegory on Christianity vs. pagan religions. Or in series one of Game of Thrones, there's a portrayal of a sect that follows 'a good shepherd', curing the body of a tribal King but seeming to steal his soul. They all end up being burned to death afaicr. You can have a good giggle at these examples, but should you adopt a more thoughtful approach and rewatch the clips, you'll see I'm right.
Oh what a pathetic snowflake you are.
None of those are remotely comparable to Germans portraying Jews as rats.
You can have a giggle at anyone and everyone, pick any category ever, including atheists, and there will be examples of people having a giggle at them, as there absolutely should be.
It is unhealthy not to have a sense of humour or self-deprecation.
I am not saying that they are remotely comparable to the Germans portraying jews as rats - they did this in The Eternal Jew, a documentary featuring stock footage of rats, which as I've said, was incredibly unpopular, making ladies faint in the cinema. The Germans then decided to stick to far more insidious portrayals within rip-roaring entertainment blockbusters, like Jud Suss, which was far more successful, and is very similar to the way Christians are portrayed in popular drama these days: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jud_Süß
You don't half talk shit on occasion. The examples you give are portrayals of fundamentalist religion. Which is entirely deserving of such portrayal, whether 'Christian' (which it clearly isn't in two of the ones you give), or otherwise.
They are portrayals of bad Christians, just as Jud Suss was a portrayal of a bad Jew. The wide prevalance of such portrayals and the dearth of any positive ones is the main concern. But they also contain a wider philosophical critique of Christianity - the weakness of 'turning the other cheek', 'rendering unto Caesar', and concepts like forgiveness is discussed in the more allegorical portrayals I mentioned, and in countless others.
The People's Vote petition demanding a Second Election has reached a million signatures.
Good news. There will be one. It may not be until July 2029, but there will certainly be one.
Even better news, it will be the UK's 59th election not its second.
You'd have thought we'd be good at them by now. Yet we elect the Conservatives most of the time.
The problem is that the Conservatives are just too welcoming so they suck up all the political talent.
The Conservatives at their best are a broad church welcoming everyone centre right. Atheists, republicans and others can sit alongside traditional conservatives in the party. Normally.
Labour at its worst is more dominated by the "moral crusade or nothing" philosophy so are less welcoming to contradictory viewpoints.
There are noteworthy exceptions to this. Especially on the site.
You can't be an atheist and a republican and be a Tory, it is logically impossible. You could just about be a libertarian rightwinger in Reform but that is it.
Just as you can't be in Labour and want to privatise the NHS and most public services, it is logically impossible.
There are limits to how broad church our main parties can be
Your first sentence is nonsense - there's far more about the country than Church and King.
The People's Vote petition demanding a Second Election has reached a million signatures.
Good news. There will be one. It may not be until July 2029, but there will certainly be one.
Even better news, it will be the UK's 59th election not its second.
You'd have thought we'd be good at them by now. Yet we elect the Conservatives most of the time.
The problem is that the Conservatives are just too welcoming so they suck up all the political talent.
The Conservatives at their best are a broad church welcoming everyone centre right. Atheists, republicans and others can sit alongside traditional conservatives in the party. Normally.
Labour at its worst is more dominated by the "moral crusade or nothing" philosophy so are less welcoming to contradictory viewpoints.
There are noteworthy exceptions to this. Especially on the site.
You can't be an atheist and a republican and be a Tory, it is logically impossible. You could just about be a libertarian rightwinger in Reform but that is it.
Just as you can't be in Labour and want to privatise the NHS and most public services, it is logically impossible.
There are limits to how broad church our main parties can be
Your first sentence is nonsense - there's far more about the country than Church and King.
Not for Tories, those are literally the foundations of Toryism
I lean in favour of assisted dying, but don't have a strong view.
Of course, one can take one's stance from our moral leaders - any proposed reform that churches oppose, from ending the burning of witches and heretics to legalising divorce to more or less anything Mrs Thatcher did, is usually an excellent idea.
Divorce laws in the UK are too liberal now with no fault divorce. Having a negative effect on the family and fertility rates
What conceivable benefit would you expect to acru from restricting divorce? Couples stuck in loveless marriages are not likely to bring children into them and if they did it would be for entirely the wrong reasons to the detriment of everyone.
Unless it was an arranged marriage no marriage would be loveless otherwise they would never have got married in the first place.
No marriage is perfect, you work through the downs and arguments as well as the ups
What a naive view.
Love sometimes lasts, but love sometimes dies. At which point it becomes loveless.
Go through ups and downs, yes, my wife and I have had ups and downs and we still love each other. That is a healthy marriage.
If you only have downs and the love is gone, then it's not a healthy marriage and it should be terminated.
All my biological grandparents divorced. Both my dad's parents remarried before I was even born and had a happy, healthy second marriage that took them to the end of their lives. Them divorcing and remarrying was the best thing that ever happened to them, and the family as a whole.
I was also lucky enough then to grow up with 5 grandparents (3 biological, 2 not) and am fortunate still have the two non-biological grandparents whom I love as my grandparents every bit as much as the biological ones.
My father's parents divorced and it had a negative impact on his teenage years and hit his mother hard while his father remarried.
Divorce is simply too easy nowadays, unless there is adultery or domestic violence involved divorce should be an absolute last resort and best avoided
My mother got a divorce in the late 1960's. It was incredibly difficult and took an absolute age, being one of the reasons the Denning Reforms came about. My father was a serial philanderer and he walked out the family home just after my sister was born in 1962. There was no fault on my mother's part. He was finally forced by the courts to pay maintenance in the princely sum of £4 a week. But the marriage still could not be ended for an age longer.
Allowing my mother to escape being trapped in a marriage was no "last resort"; splitting from him was not "best avoided", as for one thing it would have prevented her getting another successful, joyous marriage to my stepfather. The strain of the broken relationship and the attempts to get a divorce caused her to have several nervous breakdowns. No child should have had to endure seeing their parent go through ECT.
Your world view is so constrained. It would result in so much pain for others if rigidly adopted.
I have already said I don't oppose divorce on the grounds of adultery, even Jesus did not oppose divorce when one party had committed sexual immorality and cheated on the other.
That is not the same as supporting no fault divorce though, which I oppose even though it is now legal in the UK
"Sorry, kids, me and yer dad can't split up, even though we hate each other because some bloke called Jesus, who may or may not have existed 2000 years ago, wouldn't like it and the government don't like it very much, either, so we'll just stay together and make your life a misery until you're old enough to leave home" That's right?
If you clearly hated each other you would never have married in the first place. Most kids want both their parents at home with them
1 - People change 2 - Sometimes, especially when young and full of hormones, we make bad decisions 3 - Information that wasn't known beforehand can come to light
Your stance rejects all of the above. My mother is twice divorced. Anathema to you. For her first marriage, she fell deeply in love. A year or two down the line, her husband was diagnosed with schizophrenia. They had one daughter by then, but decided to divorce when, in the middle of an episode, he threatened the baby.
For her second marriage, she married "on the rebound." Partly because she was now used to being away from her over-controlling mother. She and my father had very different personalities - which they found out. Unfortunately, after the marriage. After several years of trying their best to make it work (and two children), they agreed to divorce.
To be honest, their divorce was the best thing they could have done for the children (me included). Rather than grow up in an air of mutual resentment and "making the best of it" through clenched teeth, we grew up in a home of love, learning, and laughter. Mum and Dad got on much better after the divorce and when they could live separately and when they didn't have to be in each other's business all the time. I actually think it was that which may have led to my sister and I both being in stable long-term marriages (her for 30 years+ at this point, me approaching 25 years). We didn't have the experience of the resentment we would doubtless have had in that alternate universe.
I reject entirely your didactic and unempathic stance.
Yes empathy is only uber liberalism, everyone else is evil and beyond the pale. Marriage, commitment of both parents to raising children, the nation's fertility rate, all irrelevant in comparison to the desires of the self first.
Well tough, I represent an argument millions agree with, especially the religious and don't give a shit whether you dislike me making it or not I will continue to do so
You represent an argument that was rejected 70 years ago and continues to be rejected since.
Far from it, Italy has recently elected a government with a more traditional view of women and the family, the US has also just elected a President and Congress with a more traditional view of the family.
The backlash against wokeism and uber liberalism has begun
Wrong.
America has just elected a twice divorced, repeatedly unfaithful adulterer as President.
Not a traditional view of the family.
And Giorgia Meloni has had a kid out of wedlock. Not exactly a bastion of religious morality.
One of the curiosities of right-populism is how many of its leaders don't reflect the values their rhetoric espouses. There's a definite lack of Corbyn/Livingstone like figures- even when their views were odd/wrong, they did sort of try to live by them.
Not that curious. There's a simple explanation.
Neither the leaders nor the voters give the slightest damn about Biblical values. HYUFD shows his contempt for the teaching of Jesus on a daily basis.
All they care about is cherrypicking elements they care about and then telling other people what they can and can't do.
Rubbish, Jesus was not a communist woke social liberal
For his day he bloody well was.
Overturning the money tables and the whole eye of the needle thing. Wanting to feed the hungry, help the poor, heal the sick.
He was incredibly woke for his era.
Wokeism is ultra pro LGBTQ+, pro division on race and sexuality lines with a particular rejection of white heterosexual male 'privilege' and uber feminist (albeit with some clash with them and the equally woke uber trans).
It is perfectly possible for big corporations to be very woke and many now are and for a poor man to be socially conservative and anti woke. Hence Harris won lots of executives from the former and Trump lots of the latter
I would seriously recommend you and and chill for a bit offline. You used to be a fairly mainstream Tory, but this culture war stuff from you is getting increasingly strange.
Jesus was clear that the route to heaven was not via the rules and traditions of the Pharisees but rather via compassion and charity to the least in society.
On personal morality his most pertinent point when stopping a stoning of an adulteress was "let him who is without sin cast the first stone".
I think it is incorrect and blasphemous to claim Jesus for any political party or view. His Kingdom is not of this world.
If Christianity and its Churches were more like you and Jesus, and less like HYUFD and Paul, I'd respect it a lot more.
Christians are still humans, they are just Christian ones. In most cases, following the example of Christ leads to living a life with a greater element of giving and social responsibility, but it doesn't transform you into an angel.
A significant problem is that far too many Christians do not try to follow the example of Christ, and instead pick the bits out of his life and the bible that allow them to live their lives as they want. Which Christ may not have approved of.
I'm really at the stage where I do wonder if organised religion has caused far more harm to the world than it has caused good.
If you have the statistics to support this view, I am interested to read them. Everything that I have read indicates that on average, Christians are far likelier to engage in charitable and other positive social activity than their non-Christian counterparts.
I also think that there's a huge trend in popular media to demonise Christianity, in ways both clearly stated (evil Christian characters) and indicated (evil characters in fantasy or pre-Christian settings but who demonstrate clear Christian traits), and this does colour views, especially when you don't really have your guard up against what is basically propaganda.
No statistics. But I would point you to our very own HYUFD as an example of someone who wants more wrong done in the world. As this thread shows.
"especially when you don't really have your guard up against what is basically propaganda."
Ahem. *you* said that????
Propaganda can come in the form of misinformation, but it can also come in the form of negative portrayals of a target group in popular drama - something discovered by the Germans when they created Jud Suss, a drama that featured an evil Jew, which was enormously more successful than their previous attempts at propaganda film documentaries portraying Jews as rats, which had been counterproductive. Similar portrayals of Christians are everywhere in popular culture.
I can't think of any such portrayals of Christians in popular culture, which is unsurprising given that Christians are a major consumer of pop culture and people don't like pissing off their customers.
What I do see is such Christians in real life, such as HYUFD of this parish.
Most pop-culture references to Christianity are gently jovial than outright nasty portrayals. And atheists tend to have equally jovial references too.
EG this exchange between the very atheist Sheldon Cooper and his very religious mother after he accidentally sees his mother engaged in coitus outside of wedlock.
Sheldon Cooper : I think what bothers me the most is the hypocrisy. Doesn't this contradict all the religious rules you've been expounding your whole life?
Mary Cooper : You're right, it does. And it is something I have been struggling with these days.
Sheldon Cooper : Then why are you doing it?
Mary Cooper : Because I'm not perfect, Shelly, and that man's booty is.
Sheldon Cooper : Well, this is confusing for me. But I don't want to stand in the way of your happiness so I'll condemn you internally while maintaining an outward appearance of acceptance.
Mary Cooper : That is very Christian of you.
I'm not really surprised, because you are the sort of mark who would simply assimilate such material without giving it any thought, except to grow a bit more strident in your anti-Christian diatribes.
A random example of the explicit form would be the dramatisations of The Handmaid's Tale - but there are too many to even mention. Any explicitly Christian character in popular media is destined to turn out to be a hypocrite philanderer at best and an axe murderer at worst.
A random example of the implicit form would be from the film Clash of the Titans, where a proto-Christian sect led by a form of prophet attempts to sacrifice Princess Andromeda to the Kracken. Or in 300, where the Persian King Xerxes (I could have that name wrong) asks the disabled character to 'kneel' before him as part of an extended allegory on Christianity vs. pagan religions. Or in series one of Game of Thrones, there's a portrayal of a sect that follows 'a good shepherd', curing the body of a tribal King but seeming to steal his soul. They all end up being burned to death afaicr. You can have a good giggle at these examples, but should you adopt a more thoughtful approach and rewatch the clips, you'll see I'm right.
Oh what a pathetic snowflake you are.
None of those are remotely comparable to Germans portraying Jews as rats.
You can have a giggle at anyone and everyone, pick any category ever, including atheists, and there will be examples of people having a giggle at them, as there absolutely should be.
It is unhealthy not to have a sense of humour or self-deprecation.
I am not saying that they are remotely comparable to the Germans portraying jews as rats - they did this in The Eternal Jew, a documentary featuring stock footage of rats, which as I've said, was incredibly unpopular, making ladies faint in the cinema. The Germans then decided to stick to far more insidious portrayals within rip-roaring entertainment blockbusters, like Jud Suss, which was far more successful, and is very similar to the way Christians are portrayed in popular drama these days: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jud_Süß
You don't half talk shit on occasion. The examples you give are portrayals of fundamentalist religion. Which is entirely deserving of such portrayal, whether 'Christian' (which it clearly isn't in two of the ones you give), or otherwise.
They are portrayals of bad Christians, just as Jud Suss was a portrayal of a bad Jew. The wide prevalance of such portrayals and the dearth of any positive ones is the main concern. But they also contain a wider philosophical critique of Christianity - the weakness of 'turning the other cheek', 'rendering unto Caesar', and concepts like forgiveness is discussed in the more allegorical portrayals I mentioned, and in countless others.
The portrayal of the Zoroastrian Persian Xerxes I in the 5th Century BC is a portrayal of a bad Christian?
The People's Vote petition demanding a Second Election has reached a million signatures.
Good news. There will be one. It may not be until July 2029, but there will certainly be one.
Even better news, it will be the UK's 59th election not its second.
You'd have thought we'd be good at them by now. Yet we elect the Conservatives most of the time.
The problem is that the Conservatives are just too welcoming so they suck up all the political talent.
The Conservatives at their best are a broad church welcoming everyone centre right. Atheists, republicans and others can sit alongside traditional conservatives in the party. Normally.
Labour at its worst is more dominated by the "moral crusade or nothing" philosophy so are less welcoming to contradictory viewpoints.
There are noteworthy exceptions to this. Especially on the site.
You can't be an atheist and a republican and be a Tory, it is logically impossible. You could just about be a libertarian rightwinger in Reform but that is it.
Just as you can't be in Labour and want to privatise the NHS and most public services, it is logically impossible.
There are limits to how broad church our main parties can be
The Tory Party dissolved in the 19th Century.
You can be an atheist and a republican and a Conservative. There are many on this site and the Party has worked backwards to appeal to as many votes as possible for centuries.
No you can't, you can be a libertarian rightwinger as an atheist republican but not a traditional British Conservative
The People's Vote petition demanding a Second Election has reached a million signatures.
Good news. There will be one. It may not be until July 2029, but there will certainly be one.
Even better news, it will be the UK's 59th election not its second.
You'd have thought we'd be good at them by now. Yet we elect the Conservatives most of the time.
The problem is that the Conservatives are just too welcoming so they suck up all the political talent.
The Conservatives at their best are a broad church welcoming everyone centre right. Atheists, republicans and others can sit alongside traditional conservatives in the party. Normally.
Labour at its worst is more dominated by the "moral crusade or nothing" philosophy so are less welcoming to contradictory viewpoints.
There are noteworthy exceptions to this. Especially on the site.
You can't be an atheist and a republican and be a Tory, it is logically impossible. You could just about be a libertarian rightwinger in Reform but that is it.
Just as you can't be in Labour and want to privatise the NHS and most public services, it is logically impossible.
There are limits to how broad church our main parties can be
Your first sentence is nonsense - there's far more about the country than Church and King.
Not for Tories, those are literally the foundations of Toryism
Well I don't know whether that's true or not, but I can tell you that if the Tories decided to campaign on 'Church and King' now they'd barely get a vote.
Edit: As to the first point, it turns out very definitely not - admittedly this view is based on limited research, but backs up my prior thoughts and the rebelling against throne altar and cottage - which is better known.
Another example of a serious economic issue for the UK, for which a non partisan solution is desperately needed.
How long does it take to build a mile of tramway?
https://www.samdumitriu.com/p/how-long-does-it-take-to-build-a Birmingham is right now building a mile long extension to the West Midlands Metro, which will end up taking 13 years in total from the initial proposal to the first trams operating. More than six years were spent in the planning process. This isn’t atypical either, tram construction experts we’ve spoken to have said that schemes in the UK take more than a decade to get built.
Countries that build trams cheaper, tend to also approve and build them faster. Dijon, France built their 12 mile tramway network in just two years, after two years of planning. Dijon’s tramway cost just £38m per mile. Birmingham’s cost six times more at £233m per mile. ..
It's not just trams.
Trams, roads, rails, houses, prisons, factories, power supply and every other dammed thing.
Our planning system is broken and not fit for purpose.
Hence "another example". I genuinely think we could add at least a couple of percent to GDP just by sorting this.
Politically hard to force through, but economically, it ought to be an easy win.
I've long argued for the benefits of adopting Agile beyond digital programmes.
The problem with 'tradititional' project and programme management is a reluctance to admit that requirements creep is inevitable and likely substantial, the end result frequently differs substantially from early specs, and 'stuff getting overtaken by events' happens all the time and shouldn't be surprising.
This typically results in dogmatic attempts to resist changes to the project plan, rather than embracing them and exerting a willingness towards flexibility.
There is a pigheaded rigidity in our planning systems that just doesn't work in practice.
I lean in favour of assisted dying, but don't have a strong view.
Of course, one can take one's stance from our moral leaders - any proposed reform that churches oppose, from ending the burning of witches and heretics to legalising divorce to more or less anything Mrs Thatcher did, is usually an excellent idea.
Divorce laws in the UK are too liberal now with no fault divorce. Having a negative effect on the family and fertility rates
What conceivable benefit would you expect to acru from restricting divorce? Couples stuck in loveless marriages are not likely to bring children into them and if they did it would be for entirely the wrong reasons to the detriment of everyone.
Unless it was an arranged marriage no marriage would be loveless otherwise they would never have got married in the first place.
No marriage is perfect, you work through the downs and arguments as well as the ups
What a naive view.
Love sometimes lasts, but love sometimes dies. At which point it becomes loveless.
Go through ups and downs, yes, my wife and I have had ups and downs and we still love each other. That is a healthy marriage.
If you only have downs and the love is gone, then it's not a healthy marriage and it should be terminated.
All my biological grandparents divorced. Both my dad's parents remarried before I was even born and had a happy, healthy second marriage that took them to the end of their lives. Them divorcing and remarrying was the best thing that ever happened to them, and the family as a whole.
I was also lucky enough then to grow up with 5 grandparents (3 biological, 2 not) and am fortunate still have the two non-biological grandparents whom I love as my grandparents every bit as much as the biological ones.
My father's parents divorced and it had a negative impact on his teenage years and hit his mother hard while his father remarried.
Divorce is simply too easy nowadays, unless there is adultery or domestic violence involved divorce should be an absolute last resort and best avoided
My mother got a divorce in the late 1960's. It was incredibly difficult and took an absolute age, being one of the reasons the Denning Reforms came about. My father was a serial philanderer and he walked out the family home just after my sister was born in 1962. There was no fault on my mother's part. He was finally forced by the courts to pay maintenance in the princely sum of £4 a week. But the marriage still could not be ended for an age longer.
Allowing my mother to escape being trapped in a marriage was no "last resort"; splitting from him was not "best avoided", as for one thing it would have prevented her getting another successful, joyous marriage to my stepfather. The strain of the broken relationship and the attempts to get a divorce caused her to have several nervous breakdowns. No child should have had to endure seeing their parent go through ECT.
Your world view is so constrained. It would result in so much pain for others if rigidly adopted.
I have already said I don't oppose divorce on the grounds of adultery, even Jesus did not oppose divorce when one party had committed sexual immorality and cheated on the other.
That is not the same as supporting no fault divorce though, which I oppose even though it is now legal in the UK
"Sorry, kids, me and yer dad can't split up, even though we hate each other because some bloke called Jesus, who may or may not have existed 2000 years ago, wouldn't like it and the government don't like it very much, either, so we'll just stay together and make your life a misery until you're old enough to leave home" That's right?
If you clearly hated each other you would never have married in the first place. Most kids want both their parents at home with them
1 - People change 2 - Sometimes, especially when young and full of hormones, we make bad decisions 3 - Information that wasn't known beforehand can come to light
Your stance rejects all of the above. My mother is twice divorced. Anathema to you. For her first marriage, she fell deeply in love. A year or two down the line, her husband was diagnosed with schizophrenia. They had one daughter by then, but decided to divorce when, in the middle of an episode, he threatened the baby.
For her second marriage, she married "on the rebound." Partly because she was now used to being away from her over-controlling mother. She and my father had very different personalities - which they found out. Unfortunately, after the marriage. After several years of trying their best to make it work (and two children), they agreed to divorce.
To be honest, their divorce was the best thing they could have done for the children (me included). Rather than grow up in an air of mutual resentment and "making the best of it" through clenched teeth, we grew up in a home of love, learning, and laughter. Mum and Dad got on much better after the divorce and when they could live separately and when they didn't have to be in each other's business all the time. I actually think it was that which may have led to my sister and I both being in stable long-term marriages (her for 30 years+ at this point, me approaching 25 years). We didn't have the experience of the resentment we would doubtless have had in that alternate universe.
I reject entirely your didactic and unempathic stance.
Yes empathy is only uber liberalism, everyone else is evil and beyond the pale. Marriage, commitment of both parents to raising children, the nation's fertility rate, all irrelevant in comparison to the desires of the self first.
Well tough, I represent an argument millions agree with, especially the religious and don't give a shit whether you dislike me making it or not I will continue to do so
You represent an argument that was rejected 70 years ago and continues to be rejected since.
Far from it, Italy has recently elected a government with a more traditional view of women and the family, the US has also just elected a President and Congress with a more traditional view of the family.
The backlash against wokeism and uber liberalism has begun
Wrong.
America has just elected a twice divorced, repeatedly unfaithful adulterer as President.
Not a traditional view of the family.
And Giorgia Meloni has had a kid out of wedlock. Not exactly a bastion of religious morality.
One of the curiosities of right-populism is how many of its leaders don't reflect the values their rhetoric espouses. There's a definite lack of Corbyn/Livingstone like figures- even when their views were odd/wrong, they did sort of try to live by them.
Not that curious. There's a simple explanation.
Neither the leaders nor the voters give the slightest damn about Biblical values. HYUFD shows his contempt for the teaching of Jesus on a daily basis.
All they care about is cherrypicking elements they care about and then telling other people what they can and can't do.
Rubbish, Jesus was not a communist woke social liberal
For his day he bloody well was.
Overturning the money tables and the whole eye of the needle thing. Wanting to feed the hungry, help the poor, heal the sick.
He was incredibly woke for his era.
Wokeism is ultra pro LGBTQ+, pro division on race and sexuality lines with a particular rejection of white heterosexual male 'privilege' and uber feminist (albeit with some clash with them and the equally woke uber trans).
It is perfectly possible for big corporations to be very woke and many now are and for a poor man to be socially conservative and anti woke. Hence Harris won lots of executives from the former and Trump lots of the latter
I would seriously recommend you and and chill for a bit offline. You used to be a fairly mainstream Tory, but this culture war stuff from you is getting increasingly strange.
Jesus was clear that the route to heaven was not via the rules and traditions of the Pharisees but rather via compassion and charity to the least in society.
On personal morality his most pertinent point when stopping a stoning of an adulteress was "let him who is without sin cast the first stone".
I think it is incorrect and blasphemous to claim Jesus for any political party or view. His Kingdom is not of this world.
If Christianity and its Churches were more like you and Jesus, and less like HYUFD and Paul, I'd respect it a lot more.
Christians are still humans, they are just Christian ones. In most cases, following the example of Christ leads to living a life with a greater element of giving and social responsibility, but it doesn't transform you into an angel.
A significant problem is that far too many Christians do not try to follow the example of Christ, and instead pick the bits out of his life and the bible that allow them to live their lives as they want. Which Christ may not have approved of.
I'm really at the stage where I do wonder if organised religion has caused far more harm to the world than it has caused good.
If you have the statistics to support this view, I am interested to read them. Everything that I have read indicates that on average, Christians are far likelier to engage in charitable and other positive social activity than their non-Christian counterparts.
I also think that there's a huge trend in popular media to demonise Christianity, in ways both clearly stated (evil Christian characters) and indicated (evil characters in fantasy or pre-Christian settings but who demonstrate clear Christian traits), and this does colour views, especially when you don't really have your guard up against what is basically propaganda.
No statistics. But I would point you to our very own HYUFD as an example of someone who wants more wrong done in the world. As this thread shows.
"especially when you don't really have your guard up against what is basically propaganda."
Ahem. *you* said that????
Propaganda can come in the form of misinformation, but it can also come in the form of negative portrayals of a target group in popular drama - something discovered by the Germans when they created Jud Suss, a drama that featured an evil Jew, which was enormously more successful than their previous attempts at propaganda film documentaries portraying Jews as rats, which had been counterproductive. Similar portrayals of Christians are everywhere in popular culture.
I can't think of any such portrayals of Christians in popular culture, which is unsurprising given that Christians are a major consumer of pop culture and people don't like pissing off their customers.
What I do see is such Christians in real life, such as HYUFD of this parish.
Most pop-culture references to Christianity are gently jovial than outright nasty portrayals. And atheists tend to have equally jovial references too.
EG this exchange between the very atheist Sheldon Cooper and his very religious mother after he accidentally sees his mother engaged in coitus outside of wedlock.
Sheldon Cooper : I think what bothers me the most is the hypocrisy. Doesn't this contradict all the religious rules you've been expounding your whole life?
Mary Cooper : You're right, it does. And it is something I have been struggling with these days.
Sheldon Cooper : Then why are you doing it?
Mary Cooper : Because I'm not perfect, Shelly, and that man's booty is.
Sheldon Cooper : Well, this is confusing for me. But I don't want to stand in the way of your happiness so I'll condemn you internally while maintaining an outward appearance of acceptance.
Mary Cooper : That is very Christian of you.
I'm not really surprised, because you are the sort of mark who would simply assimilate such material without giving it any thought, except to grow a bit more strident in your anti-Christian diatribes.
A random example of the explicit form would be the dramatisations of The Handmaid's Tale - but there are too many to even mention. Any explicitly Christian character in popular media is destined to turn out to be a hypocrite philanderer at best and an axe murderer at worst.
A random example of the implicit form would be from the film Clash of the Titans, where a proto-Christian sect led by a form of prophet attempts to sacrifice Princess Andromeda to the Kracken. Or in 300, where the Persian King Xerxes (I could have that name wrong) asks the disabled character to 'kneel' before him as part of an extended allegory on Christianity vs. pagan religions. Or in series one of Game of Thrones, there's a portrayal of a sect that follows 'a good shepherd', curing the body of a tribal King but seeming to steal his soul. They all end up being burned to death afaicr. You can have a good giggle at these examples, but should you adopt a more thoughtful approach and rewatch the clips, you'll see I'm right.
Oh what a pathetic snowflake you are.
None of those are remotely comparable to Germans portraying Jews as rats.
You can have a giggle at anyone and everyone, pick any category ever, including atheists, and there will be examples of people having a giggle at them, as there absolutely should be.
It is unhealthy not to have a sense of humour or self-deprecation.
I am not saying that they are remotely comparable to the Germans portraying jews as rats - they did this in The Eternal Jew, a documentary featuring stock footage of rats, which as I've said, was incredibly unpopular, making ladies faint in the cinema. The Germans then decided to stick to far more insidious portrayals within rip-roaring entertainment blockbusters, like Jud Suss, which was far more successful, and is very similar to the way Christians are portrayed in popular drama these days: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jud_Süß
You don't half talk shit on occasion. The examples you give are portrayals of fundamentalist religion. Which is entirely deserving of such portrayal, whether 'Christian' (which it clearly isn't in two of the ones you give), or otherwise.
They are portrayals of bad Christians, just as Jud Suss was a portrayal of a bad Jew. The wide prevalance of such portrayals and the dearth of any positive ones is the main concern. But they also contain a wider philosophical critique of Christianity - the weakness of 'turning the other cheek', 'rendering unto Caesar', and concepts like forgiveness is discussed in the more allegorical portrayals I mentioned, and in countless others.
I don't see media portrayals of Christianity as anti-Christian so much as often quite often ignorant of Christianity. You can have a film like Take Me to Hell, about a woman who is cursed to go to hell, and does everything she can to shake off the curse, but her efforts to avoid damnation only result in her going to hell.
Which is far more an ancient pagan belief than anything that approximates mainstream Christian belief.
I lean in favour of assisted dying, but don't have a strong view.
Of course, one can take one's stance from our moral leaders - any proposed reform that churches oppose, from ending the burning of witches and heretics to legalising divorce to more or less anything Mrs Thatcher did, is usually an excellent idea.
Divorce laws in the UK are too liberal now with no fault divorce. Having a negative effect on the family and fertility rates
What conceivable benefit would you expect to acru from restricting divorce? Couples stuck in loveless marriages are not likely to bring children into them and if they did it would be for entirely the wrong reasons to the detriment of everyone.
Unless it was an arranged marriage no marriage would be loveless otherwise they would never have got married in the first place.
No marriage is perfect, you work through the downs and arguments as well as the ups
What a naive view.
Love sometimes lasts, but love sometimes dies. At which point it becomes loveless.
Go through ups and downs, yes, my wife and I have had ups and downs and we still love each other. That is a healthy marriage.
If you only have downs and the love is gone, then it's not a healthy marriage and it should be terminated.
All my biological grandparents divorced. Both my dad's parents remarried before I was even born and had a happy, healthy second marriage that took them to the end of their lives. Them divorcing and remarrying was the best thing that ever happened to them, and the family as a whole.
I was also lucky enough then to grow up with 5 grandparents (3 biological, 2 not) and am fortunate still have the two non-biological grandparents whom I love as my grandparents every bit as much as the biological ones.
My father's parents divorced and it had a negative impact on his teenage years and hit his mother hard while his father remarried.
Divorce is simply too easy nowadays, unless there is adultery or domestic violence involved divorce should be an absolute last resort and best avoided
My mother got a divorce in the late 1960's. It was incredibly difficult and took an absolute age, being one of the reasons the Denning Reforms came about. My father was a serial philanderer and he walked out the family home just after my sister was born in 1962. There was no fault on my mother's part. He was finally forced by the courts to pay maintenance in the princely sum of £4 a week. But the marriage still could not be ended for an age longer.
Allowing my mother to escape being trapped in a marriage was no "last resort"; splitting from him was not "best avoided", as for one thing it would have prevented her getting another successful, joyous marriage to my stepfather. The strain of the broken relationship and the attempts to get a divorce caused her to have several nervous breakdowns. No child should have had to endure seeing their parent go through ECT.
Your world view is so constrained. It would result in so much pain for others if rigidly adopted.
I have already said I don't oppose divorce on the grounds of adultery, even Jesus did not oppose divorce when one party had committed sexual immorality and cheated on the other.
That is not the same as supporting no fault divorce though, which I oppose even though it is now legal in the UK
"Sorry, kids, me and yer dad can't split up, even though we hate each other because some bloke called Jesus, who may or may not have existed 2000 years ago, wouldn't like it and the government don't like it very much, either, so we'll just stay together and make your life a misery until you're old enough to leave home" That's right?
If you clearly hated each other you would never have married in the first place. Most kids want both their parents at home with them
1 - People change 2 - Sometimes, especially when young and full of hormones, we make bad decisions 3 - Information that wasn't known beforehand can come to light
Your stance rejects all of the above. My mother is twice divorced. Anathema to you. For her first marriage, she fell deeply in love. A year or two down the line, her husband was diagnosed with schizophrenia. They had one daughter by then, but decided to divorce when, in the middle of an episode, he threatened the baby.
For her second marriage, she married "on the rebound." Partly because she was now used to being away from her over-controlling mother. She and my father had very different personalities - which they found out. Unfortunately, after the marriage. After several years of trying their best to make it work (and two children), they agreed to divorce.
To be honest, their divorce was the best thing they could have done for the children (me included). Rather than grow up in an air of mutual resentment and "making the best of it" through clenched teeth, we grew up in a home of love, learning, and laughter. Mum and Dad got on much better after the divorce and when they could live separately and when they didn't have to be in each other's business all the time. I actually think it was that which may have led to my sister and I both being in stable long-term marriages (her for 30 years+ at this point, me approaching 25 years). We didn't have the experience of the resentment we would doubtless have had in that alternate universe.
I reject entirely your didactic and unempathic stance.
Yes empathy is only uber liberalism, everyone else is evil and beyond the pale. Marriage, commitment of both parents to raising children, the nation's fertility rate, all irrelevant in comparison to the desires of the self first.
Well tough, I represent an argument millions agree with, especially the religious and don't give a shit whether you dislike me making it or not I will continue to do so
You represent an argument that was rejected 70 years ago and continues to be rejected since.
Far from it, Italy has recently elected a government with a more traditional view of women and the family, the US has also just elected a President and Congress with a more traditional view of the family.
The backlash against wokeism and uber liberalism has begun
Wrong.
America has just elected a twice divorced, repeatedly unfaithful adulterer as President.
Not a traditional view of the family.
And Giorgia Meloni has had a kid out of wedlock. Not exactly a bastion of religious morality.
One of the curiosities of right-populism is how many of its leaders don't reflect the values their rhetoric espouses. There's a definite lack of Corbyn/Livingstone like figures- even when their views were odd/wrong, they did sort of try to live by them.
Not that curious. There's a simple explanation.
Neither the leaders nor the voters give the slightest damn about Biblical values. HYUFD shows his contempt for the teaching of Jesus on a daily basis.
All they care about is cherrypicking elements they care about and then telling other people what they can and can't do.
Rubbish, Jesus was not a communist woke social liberal
For his day he bloody well was.
Overturning the money tables and the whole eye of the needle thing. Wanting to feed the hungry, help the poor, heal the sick.
He was incredibly woke for his era.
Wokeism is ultra pro LGBTQ+, pro division on race and sexuality lines with a particular rejection of white heterosexual male 'privilege' and uber feminist (albeit with some clash with them and the equally woke uber trans).
It is perfectly possible for big corporations to be very woke and many now are and for a poor man to be socially conservative and anti woke. Hence Harris won lots of executives from the former and Trump lots of the latter
I would seriously recommend you and and chill for a bit offline. You used to be a fairly mainstream Tory, but this culture war stuff from you is getting increasingly strange.
Jesus was clear that the route to heaven was not via the rules and traditions of the Pharisees but rather via compassion and charity to the least in society.
On personal morality his most pertinent point when stopping a stoning of an adulteress was "let him who is without sin cast the first stone".
I think it is incorrect and blasphemous to claim Jesus for any political party or view. His Kingdom is not of this world.
If Christianity and its Churches were more like you and Jesus, and less like HYUFD and Paul, I'd respect it a lot more.
Christians are still humans, they are just Christian ones. In most cases, following the example of Christ leads to living a life with a greater element of giving and social responsibility, but it doesn't transform you into an angel.
A significant problem is that far too many Christians do not try to follow the example of Christ, and instead pick the bits out of his life and the bible that allow them to live their lives as they want. Which Christ may not have approved of.
I'm really at the stage where I do wonder if organised religion has caused far more harm to the world than it has caused good.
If you have the statistics to support this view, I am interested to read them. Everything that I have read indicates that on average, Christians are far likelier to engage in charitable and other positive social activity than their non-Christian counterparts.
I also think that there's a huge trend in popular media to demonise Christianity, in ways both clearly stated (evil Christian characters) and indicated (evil characters in fantasy or pre-Christian settings but who demonstrate clear Christian traits), and this does colour views, especially when you don't really have your guard up against what is basically propaganda.
No statistics. But I would point you to our very own HYUFD as an example of someone who wants more wrong done in the world. As this thread shows.
"especially when you don't really have your guard up against what is basically propaganda."
Ahem. *you* said that????
Propaganda can come in the form of misinformation, but it can also come in the form of negative portrayals of a target group in popular drama - something discovered by the Germans when they created Jud Suss, a drama that featured an evil Jew, which was enormously more successful than their previous attempts at propaganda film documentaries portraying Jews as rats, which had been counterproductive. Similar portrayals of Christians are everywhere in popular culture.
I can't think of any such portrayals of Christians in popular culture, which is unsurprising given that Christians are a major consumer of pop culture and people don't like pissing off their customers.
What I do see is such Christians in real life, such as HYUFD of this parish.
Most pop-culture references to Christianity are gently jovial than outright nasty portrayals. And atheists tend to have equally jovial references too.
EG this exchange between the very atheist Sheldon Cooper and his very religious mother after he accidentally sees his mother engaged in coitus outside of wedlock.
Sheldon Cooper : I think what bothers me the most is the hypocrisy. Doesn't this contradict all the religious rules you've been expounding your whole life?
Mary Cooper : You're right, it does. And it is something I have been struggling with these days.
Sheldon Cooper : Then why are you doing it?
Mary Cooper : Because I'm not perfect, Shelly, and that man's booty is.
Sheldon Cooper : Well, this is confusing for me. But I don't want to stand in the way of your happiness so I'll condemn you internally while maintaining an outward appearance of acceptance.
Mary Cooper : That is very Christian of you.
I'm not really surprised, because you are the sort of mark who would simply assimilate such material without giving it any thought, except to grow a bit more strident in your anti-Christian diatribes.
A random example of the explicit form would be the dramatisations of The Handmaid's Tale - but there are too many to even mention. Any explicitly Christian character in popular media is destined to turn out to be a hypocrite philanderer at best and an axe murderer at worst.
A random example of the implicit form would be from the film Clash of the Titans, where a proto-Christian sect led by a form of prophet attempts to sacrifice Princess Andromeda to the Kracken. Or in 300, where the Persian King Xerxes (I could have that name wrong) asks the disabled character to 'kneel' before him as part of an extended allegory on Christianity vs. pagan religions. Or in series one of Game of Thrones, there's a portrayal of a sect that follows 'a good shepherd', curing the body of a tribal King but seeming to steal his soul. They all end up being burned to death afaicr. You can have a good giggle at these examples, but should you adopt a more thoughtful approach and rewatch the clips, you'll see I'm right.
Oh what a pathetic snowflake you are.
None of those are remotely comparable to Germans portraying Jews as rats.
You can have a giggle at anyone and everyone, pick any category ever, including atheists, and there will be examples of people having a giggle at them, as there absolutely should be.
It is unhealthy not to have a sense of humour or self-deprecation.
I am not saying that they are remotely comparable to the Germans portraying jews as rats - they did this in The Eternal Jew, a documentary featuring stock footage of rats, which as I've said, was incredibly unpopular, making ladies faint in the cinema. The Germans then decided to stick to far more insidious portrayals within rip-roaring entertainment blockbusters, like Jud Suss, which was far more successful, and is very similar to the way Christians are portrayed in popular drama these days: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jud_Süß
You don't half talk shit on occasion. The examples you give are portrayals of fundamentalist religion. Which is entirely deserving of such portrayal, whether 'Christian' (which it clearly isn't in two of the ones you give), or otherwise.
They are portrayals of bad Christians, just as Jud Suss was a portrayal of a bad Jew. The wide prevalance of such portrayals and the dearth of any positive ones is the main concern. But they also contain a wider philosophical critique of Christianity - the weakness of 'turning the other cheek', 'rendering unto Caesar', and concepts like forgiveness is discussed in the more allegorical portrayals I mentioned, and in countless others.
The portrayal of the Zoroastrian Persian Xerxes I in the 5th Century BC is a portrayal of a bad Christian?
You are so gullible you'll believe anything.
Are you really so stupid that you have no idea what an allegory is?
The largest number of foodbanks in the U.K., from any single organisation, are led by the Trussell Trust, an Anglican charity.
When i was in Southern Italy a few years ago at the height of their economic crisis, the only people left locally with any interest to feed the hungry were the Catholic Church.
That may be true. But given what Welby has just resigned for, I might suggest that there is also a massive amount of harm done by organised churches as well. Yes, that was just one case: but it's perfectly possible to point to many, many more, including some organised by a church on a massive scale. e.g. Magdalene Laundries.
And the CofE mortgage schemes were utterly exploitative of their clergy. Shame on them.
There were also sexual abuse scandals in the BBC, paedophiles in boarding schools, the Scouts and youth football clubs and sex abusers in Hollywood and even Harrods and Parliament and the City.
It is no surprise those who want to carry out sexual abuse are attracted to areas of establishment status or wealth and paedophiles are attracted to jobs which give them access to children.
However safeguarding checks including in the Church are massively better than they were in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s and 1990s when most of these incidents occurred and we now have the DBS too
The incidents Weldby resigned for are much more recent.
I agree that people who want to abuse other people (and it is not just sexual abuse) will try to get into positions of power. The problem is that time and time again, church after church just covers it up. Often, moving priests onto other parishes so they can just resume their behaviour.
Or the behaviour was even sanctioned by the church.
They aren't, Smyth's abuse was committed in the 1980s and 1990s and he wasn't even a priest, they took place on Christian camps, he was a barrister by trade.
Now priests have to go through multiple safeguarding and DBS checks to get Parish posts
And AIUI the church was told back in the 1980s, and the warnings were ignored.
"It also highlighted how evidence of crimes had been gathered in the 1980s but was suppressed, including details of children being physically and sexually abused. ... "The scale and severity of the practice was horrific," noted the so-called Ruston report, named after the Rev Mark Ruston, who compiled it in 1982." (1)
You are excusing the inexcusable. The churches are not interested in morality or people; they are interested in power and money. Individuals within may be good, moral people; but the entire stinking edifices they work within are rotten.
I am agnostic. I like the idea of God, and I often pray. I try to live my life according to a morality that is informed by Christianity. But the reason I don't join a church?
You could equally say BBC managers turned a blind eye to abuse by the likes of Savile, or boarding school heads turned blind eyes to abuse committed by some of their teachers or even the leadership of the Liberal Party turned a blind eye to evidence of abuse by Cyril Smith or the leadership of Harrods ignored evidence of Al Fayed's abuse. It was the culture of the time and pre the DBS and safeguarding era.
Not that I am particularly devastated I don't have to endure your left liberal sanctimoniousness in any church near me
Yes, you could say that. But I would also agree that the churches are *much* larger organisations than those, and richer, and as much as they try, the BBS or boarding schools do not try to set the nation's moral tone.
I've said my own views on this many times. A small number of people in any large organisation will be abusive and bad. You often cannot tell these people before they start doing bad acts. Therefore it is key for any organisation to detect abuses and deal with them when they happen, in a way that is fair to both accuser(s) and accused.
All too often, large organisations try to save their reputations by covering up abuses. This often works in the short term (though less so nowadays, thankfully), but less so in the long term. Though the long term is often too late for the victims, especially ones that would not have become victims if action had been taken earlier.
I have zero faith that the CofE or Catholic churches (to take the two main Christian ones) are now doing this properly. Hopefully Welby's resignation may cause people high-up in the CofE to do the right thing.
" I don't have to endure your left liberal sanctimoniousness in any church near me"
Left: hardly. Liberal: probably; at least socially. sanctimoniousness: that's a bit rich coming from you, isn't it?
The People's Vote petition demanding a Second Election has reached a million signatures.
Good news. There will be one. It may not be until July 2029, but there will certainly be one.
Even better news, it will be the UK's 59th election not its second.
You'd have thought we'd be good at them by now. Yet we elect the Conservatives most of the time.
The problem is that the Conservatives are just too welcoming so they suck up all the political talent.
The Conservatives at their best are a broad church welcoming everyone centre right. Atheists, republicans and others can sit alongside traditional conservatives in the party. Normally.
Labour at its worst is more dominated by the "moral crusade or nothing" philosophy so are less welcoming to contradictory viewpoints.
There are noteworthy exceptions to this. Especially on the site.
You can't be an atheist and a republican and be a Tory, it is logically impossible. You could just about be a libertarian rightwinger in Reform but that is it.
Just as you can't be in Labour and want to privatise the NHS and most public services, it is logically impossible.
There are limits to how broad church our main parties can be
Your first sentence is nonsense - there's far more about the country than Church and King.
Not for Tories, those are literally the foundations of Toryism
Well I don't know whether that's true or not, but I can tell you that if the Tories decided to campaign on 'Church and King' now they'd barely get a vote.
Edit: As to the first point, it turns out very definitely not - admittedly this view is based on limited research, but backs up my prior thoughts and the rebelling against throne altar and cottage - which is better known.
On King over President Starmer or President Farage they certainly would get votes and many still like the notion of an established church offering weddings, funerals etc locally and in C of E form.
Though whether such principles are as electable now as they were in the 18th and early 19th century is irrelevant, they are still the core principles of Toryism
Robert Runcie and Rowan Williams are the kind of figures the Church needs again.
Dripping wet unifying figures to counter the age of polarisation and identity wars we've living in.
What it needs is a woman who is from the same Anglo Catholic wing of the C of E as they were, given I cannot think of a case of a female priest who was a sex abuser and given Welby was from the evangelical wing of the C of E. Someone like the Bishop of Chelmsford or Newcastle who takes safeguarding seriously and would put Parish ministry first not grand schemes
The People's Vote petition demanding a Second Election has reached a million signatures.
Good news. There will be one. It may not be until July 2029, but there will certainly be one.
Even better news, it will be the UK's 59th election not its second.
You'd have thought we'd be good at them by now. Yet we elect the Conservatives most of the time.
The problem is that the Conservatives are just too welcoming so they suck up all the political talent.
The Conservatives at their best are a broad church welcoming everyone centre right. Atheists, republicans and others can sit alongside traditional conservatives in the party. Normally.
Labour at its worst is more dominated by the "moral crusade or nothing" philosophy so are less welcoming to contradictory viewpoints.
There are noteworthy exceptions to this. Especially on the site.
You can't be an atheist and a republican and be a Tory, it is logically impossible. You could just about be a libertarian rightwinger in Reform but that is it.
Just as you can't be in Labour and want to privatise the NHS and most public services, it is logically impossible.
There are limits to how broad church our main parties can be
Your first sentence is nonsense - there's far more about the country than Church and King.
Not for Tories, those are literally the foundations of Toryism
Well I don't know whether that's true or not, but I can tell you that if the Tories decided to campaign on 'Church and King' now they'd barely get a vote.
Edit: As to the first point, it turns out very definitely not - admittedly this view is based on limited research, but backs up my prior thoughts and the rebelling against throne altar and cottage - which is better known.
On King over President Starmer or President Farage they certainly would get votes and many still like the notion of an established church offering weddings, funerals etc locally and in C of E form.
Though whether such principles are as electable now as they were in the 18th and early 19th century is irrelevant, they are still the core principles of Toryism
Well you're just wrong. How do you counter the throne altar and cottage thing? Toryism was a movement against the narrow view, an embracement of what we have rather than what we are supposedly given.
I lean in favour of assisted dying, but don't have a strong view.
Of course, one can take one's stance from our moral leaders - any proposed reform that churches oppose, from ending the burning of witches and heretics to legalising divorce to more or less anything Mrs Thatcher did, is usually an excellent idea.
Divorce laws in the UK are too liberal now with no fault divorce. Having a negative effect on the family and fertility rates
What conceivable benefit would you expect to acru from restricting divorce? Couples stuck in loveless marriages are not likely to bring children into them and if they did it would be for entirely the wrong reasons to the detriment of everyone.
Unless it was an arranged marriage no marriage would be loveless otherwise they would never have got married in the first place.
No marriage is perfect, you work through the downs and arguments as well as the ups
What a naive view.
Love sometimes lasts, but love sometimes dies. At which point it becomes loveless.
Go through ups and downs, yes, my wife and I have had ups and downs and we still love each other. That is a healthy marriage.
If you only have downs and the love is gone, then it's not a healthy marriage and it should be terminated.
All my biological grandparents divorced. Both my dad's parents remarried before I was even born and had a happy, healthy second marriage that took them to the end of their lives. Them divorcing and remarrying was the best thing that ever happened to them, and the family as a whole.
I was also lucky enough then to grow up with 5 grandparents (3 biological, 2 not) and am fortunate still have the two non-biological grandparents whom I love as my grandparents every bit as much as the biological ones.
My father's parents divorced and it had a negative impact on his teenage years and hit his mother hard while his father remarried.
Divorce is simply too easy nowadays, unless there is adultery or domestic violence involved divorce should be an absolute last resort and best avoided
My mother got a divorce in the late 1960's. It was incredibly difficult and took an absolute age, being one of the reasons the Denning Reforms came about. My father was a serial philanderer and he walked out the family home just after my sister was born in 1962. There was no fault on my mother's part. He was finally forced by the courts to pay maintenance in the princely sum of £4 a week. But the marriage still could not be ended for an age longer.
Allowing my mother to escape being trapped in a marriage was no "last resort"; splitting from him was not "best avoided", as for one thing it would have prevented her getting another successful, joyous marriage to my stepfather. The strain of the broken relationship and the attempts to get a divorce caused her to have several nervous breakdowns. No child should have had to endure seeing their parent go through ECT.
Your world view is so constrained. It would result in so much pain for others if rigidly adopted.
I have already said I don't oppose divorce on the grounds of adultery, even Jesus did not oppose divorce when one party had committed sexual immorality and cheated on the other.
That is not the same as supporting no fault divorce though, which I oppose even though it is now legal in the UK
"Sorry, kids, me and yer dad can't split up, even though we hate each other because some bloke called Jesus, who may or may not have existed 2000 years ago, wouldn't like it and the government don't like it very much, either, so we'll just stay together and make your life a misery until you're old enough to leave home" That's right?
If you clearly hated each other you would never have married in the first place. Most kids want both their parents at home with them
1 - People change 2 - Sometimes, especially when young and full of hormones, we make bad decisions 3 - Information that wasn't known beforehand can come to light
Your stance rejects all of the above. My mother is twice divorced. Anathema to you. For her first marriage, she fell deeply in love. A year or two down the line, her husband was diagnosed with schizophrenia. They had one daughter by then, but decided to divorce when, in the middle of an episode, he threatened the baby.
For her second marriage, she married "on the rebound." Partly because she was now used to being away from her over-controlling mother. She and my father had very different personalities - which they found out. Unfortunately, after the marriage. After several years of trying their best to make it work (and two children), they agreed to divorce.
To be honest, their divorce was the best thing they could have done for the children (me included). Rather than grow up in an air of mutual resentment and "making the best of it" through clenched teeth, we grew up in a home of love, learning, and laughter. Mum and Dad got on much better after the divorce and when they could live separately and when they didn't have to be in each other's business all the time. I actually think it was that which may have led to my sister and I both being in stable long-term marriages (her for 30 years+ at this point, me approaching 25 years). We didn't have the experience of the resentment we would doubtless have had in that alternate universe.
I reject entirely your didactic and unempathic stance.
Yes empathy is only uber liberalism, everyone else is evil and beyond the pale. Marriage, commitment of both parents to raising children, the nation's fertility rate, all irrelevant in comparison to the desires of the self first.
Well tough, I represent an argument millions agree with, especially the religious and don't give a shit whether you dislike me making it or not I will continue to do so
You represent an argument that was rejected 70 years ago and continues to be rejected since.
Far from it, Italy has recently elected a government with a more traditional view of women and the family, the US has also just elected a President and Congress with a more traditional view of the family.
The backlash against wokeism and uber liberalism has begun
Wrong.
America has just elected a twice divorced, repeatedly unfaithful adulterer as President.
Not a traditional view of the family.
And Giorgia Meloni has had a kid out of wedlock. Not exactly a bastion of religious morality.
One of the curiosities of right-populism is how many of its leaders don't reflect the values their rhetoric espouses. There's a definite lack of Corbyn/Livingstone like figures- even when their views were odd/wrong, they did sort of try to live by them.
Not that curious. There's a simple explanation.
Neither the leaders nor the voters give the slightest damn about Biblical values. HYUFD shows his contempt for the teaching of Jesus on a daily basis.
All they care about is cherrypicking elements they care about and then telling other people what they can and can't do.
Rubbish, Jesus was not a communist woke social liberal
For his day he bloody well was.
Overturning the money tables and the whole eye of the needle thing. Wanting to feed the hungry, help the poor, heal the sick.
He was incredibly woke for his era.
Wokeism is ultra pro LGBTQ+, pro division on race and sexuality lines with a particular rejection of white heterosexual male 'privilege' and uber feminist (albeit with some clash with them and the equally woke uber trans).
It is perfectly possible for big corporations to be very woke and many now are and for a poor man to be socially conservative and anti woke. Hence Harris won lots of executives from the former and Trump lots of the latter
I would seriously recommend you and and chill for a bit offline. You used to be a fairly mainstream Tory, but this culture war stuff from you is getting increasingly strange.
Jesus was clear that the route to heaven was not via the rules and traditions of the Pharisees but rather via compassion and charity to the least in society.
On personal morality his most pertinent point when stopping a stoning of an adulteress was "let him who is without sin cast the first stone".
I think it is incorrect and blasphemous to claim Jesus for any political party or view. His Kingdom is not of this world.
If memory serves, the route to heaven is acceptance of Jesus Christ as your saviour in your heart and sincere repentance of your sins. The recommendations on how to behave are desirable but not strictly necessary except to demonstrate sincerity.
I think most Christians would claim that both Grace and Works are needed,
Yours is the view according to Paul, but the James 1:22-26 is pretty clear that hearing the Gospel is not enough:
22 Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. 23 Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror 24 and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. 25 But whoever looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues in it—not forgetting what they have heard, but doing it—they will be blessed in what they do.
26 Those who consider themselves religious and yet do not keep a tight rein on their tongues deceive themselves, and their religion is worthless. 27 Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.
Additionally on several occasions Jesus cites as good examples people who do not abide by the scriptures such as the Roman Centurion or the Good Samaritan.
Yes you did and a very good article it was too, making my proposed Christian article entirely redundant. Your points are noted.
The People's Vote petition demanding a Second Election has reached a million signatures.
Good news. There will be one. It may not be until July 2029, but there will certainly be one.
Even better news, it will be the UK's 59th election not its second.
You'd have thought we'd be good at them by now. Yet we elect the Conservatives most of the time.
The problem is that the Conservatives are just too welcoming so they suck up all the political talent.
The Conservatives at their best are a broad church welcoming everyone centre right. Atheists, republicans and others can sit alongside traditional conservatives in the party. Normally.
Labour at its worst is more dominated by the "moral crusade or nothing" philosophy so are less welcoming to contradictory viewpoints.
There are noteworthy exceptions to this. Especially on the site.
You can't be an atheist and a republican and be a Tory, it is logically impossible. You could just about be a libertarian rightwinger in Reform but that is it.
Just as you can't be in Labour and want to privatise the NHS and most public services, it is logically impossible.
There are limits to how broad church our main parties can be
Your first sentence is nonsense - there's far more about the country than Church and King.
Not for Tories, those are literally the foundations of Toryism
Well I don't know whether that's true or not, but I can tell you that if the Tories decided to campaign on 'Church and King' now they'd barely get a vote.
Edit: As to the first point, it turns out very definitely not - admittedly this view is based on limited research, but backs up my prior thoughts and the rebelling against throne altar and cottage - which is better known.
On King over President Starmer or President Farage they certainly would get votes and many still like the notion of an established church offering weddings, funerals etc locally and in C of E form.
Though whether such principles are as electable now as they were in the 18th and early 19th century is irrelevant, they are still the core principles of Toryism
Well you're just wrong. How do you counter the throne altar and cottage thing? Toryism was a movement against the narrow view, an embracement of what we have rather than what we are supposedly given.
What on earth has that got to do with anything? No it was not. The Tory Party was founded in the 18th century to be the party of King, established C of E and the landed gentry, they were literally its founding principles. How the modern Conservative Party has evolved since to include some free market liberals for instance doesn't change that (and even such liberals generally wanted a reformist monarchy and full inclusion of nonconformist Christian groups like the Baptists and Methodists as well as RCs in national life, they weren't atheist republicans)
Another example of a serious economic issue for the UK, for which a non partisan solution is desperately needed.
How long does it take to build a mile of tramway?
https://www.samdumitriu.com/p/how-long-does-it-take-to-build-a Birmingham is right now building a mile long extension to the West Midlands Metro, which will end up taking 13 years in total from the initial proposal to the first trams operating. More than six years were spent in the planning process. This isn’t atypical either, tram construction experts we’ve spoken to have said that schemes in the UK take more than a decade to get built.
Countries that build trams cheaper, tend to also approve and build them faster. Dijon, France built their 12 mile tramway network in just two years, after two years of planning. Dijon’s tramway cost just £38m per mile. Birmingham’s cost six times more at £233m per mile. ..
It's not just trams.
Trams, roads, rails, houses, prisons, factories, power supply and every other dammed thing.
Our planning system is broken and not fit for purpose.
Hence "another example". I genuinely think we could add at least a couple of percent to GDP just by sorting this.
Politically hard to force through, but economically, it ought to be an easy win.
Although if you look at the case of the Derby incinerator I showed earlier, the planning process repeatedly rejected it, before appeals to the High Court eventually reversed the decision. Given that the project was utterly stupid, I'd argue the planning process got it correct, and it would have saved Derbeians many tens of millions.
(Though I don't know if the reasons the planners rejected it were related to the reasons it failed, or due to base NIMBYism. It is easy to be right for the wrong reasons.)
One of the problems with NIMBYism is that it discredits reasonable objections by association
Comments
Quite easy to see how the safeguards envisaged become a nullity.
https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2024/09/22/they-shall-take-up-serpents-god-guns-abortion-and-trump/
I think most Christians would claim that both Grace and Works are needed,
Yours is the view according to Paul, but the James 1:22-26 is pretty clear that hearing the Gospel is not enough:
22 Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. 23 Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror 24 and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. 25 But whoever looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues in it—not forgetting what they have heard, but doing it—they will be blessed in what they do.
26 Those who consider themselves religious and yet do not keep a tight rein on their tongues deceive themselves, and their religion is worthless. 27 Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.
Additionally on several occasions Jesus cites as good examples people who do not abide by the scriptures such as the Roman Centurion or the Good Samaritan.
Labour at its worst is more dominated by the "moral crusade or nothing" philosophy so are less welcoming to contradictory viewpoints.
There are noteworthy exceptions to this. Especially on the site.
In fact, the only scandal that hasn’t been in Private Eye, before it broke, was Rotherham. Or does anyone know of others?
Speaking of Private Eye, does anyone want to run a book on which scandal reported in the Eye will break next? Break next defined a front page of BBC.com
I genuinely think we could add at least a couple of percent to GDP just by sorting this.
Politically hard to force through, but economically, it ought to be an easy win.
Snowflakes like you are like Isaac Hayes who was perfectly happy to work on a show that ruthlessly mocked anyone and everyone until his own religion was the butt of the joke.
You have a pathetic list of implied digs, that you make tenuous straw grasping links on, while ignoring the fact that everyone is the subject to digs sometimes.
It is unhealthy not to be. Anyone never mocked would not be in a good place.
The examples you give are portrayals of fundamentalist religion. Which is entirely deserving of such portrayal, whether 'Christian' (which it clearly isn't in two of the ones you give), or otherwise.
Just as you can't be in Labour and want to privatise the NHS and most public services, it is logically impossible.
There are limits to how broad church our main parties can be
(Though I don't know if the reasons the planners rejected it were related to the reasons it failed, or due to base NIMBYism. It is easy to be right for the wrong reasons.)
Not that I am particularly devastated I don't have to endure your left liberal sanctimoniousness in any church near me
But Jesus' apparent indifference to the family business is a nice example of why older business people and farmers hate doing this - the young might get religion and start wasting assets, giving assets away and stuff like that.
You can be an atheist and a republican and a Conservative. There are many on this site and the Party has worked backwards to appeal to as many votes as possible for centuries.
You are so gullible you'll believe anything.
But it's true, isn't it. The Brexit/Boris/Truss period has been a repellent for tory talent. Even before that it wasn't great.
Oh for the likes of Jim Prior and Lord Carrington.
Edit: As to the first point, it turns out very definitely not - admittedly this view is based on limited research, but backs up my prior thoughts and the rebelling against throne altar and cottage - which is better known.
NEW THREAD
I've long argued for the benefits of adopting Agile beyond digital programmes.
The problem with 'tradititional' project and programme management is a reluctance to admit that requirements creep is inevitable and likely substantial, the end result frequently differs substantially from early specs, and 'stuff getting overtaken by events' happens all the time and shouldn't be surprising.
This typically results in dogmatic attempts to resist changes to the project plan, rather than embracing them and exerting a willingness towards flexibility.
There is a pigheaded rigidity in our planning systems that just doesn't work in practice.
Which is far more an ancient pagan belief than anything that approximates mainstream Christian belief.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/allegory#:~:text=Allegory is a more or,all considered types of allegories.
I'm not sure how I can engage with someone with the analytical abilities of a 12 year old.
I've said my own views on this many times. A small number of people in any large organisation will be abusive and bad. You often cannot tell these people before they start doing bad acts. Therefore it is key for any organisation to detect abuses and deal with them when they happen, in a way that is fair to both accuser(s) and accused.
All too often, large organisations try to save their reputations by covering up abuses. This often works in the short term (though less so nowadays, thankfully), but less so in the long term. Though the long term is often too late for the victims, especially ones that would not have become victims if action had been taken earlier.
I have zero faith that the CofE or Catholic churches (to take the two main Christian ones) are now doing this properly. Hopefully Welby's resignation may cause people high-up in the CofE to do the right thing.
" I don't have to endure your left liberal sanctimoniousness in any church near me"
Left: hardly.
Liberal: probably; at least socially.
sanctimoniousness: that's a bit rich coming from you, isn't it?
Dripping wet unifying figures to counter the age of polarisation and identity wars we've living in.
Though whether such principles are as electable now as they were in the 18th and early 19th century is irrelevant, they are still the core principles of Toryism