The humanist moaners are at it again wanting a slot for their non-religion. Sadly in discussing this the supposedly Christian spokesman from Ekklesia failed to point out the obvious. 99.99% of BBC output is from a secular humanist perspective.
I agree that this slot need reforming. Firstly there is only one regular speaker who consistently hits the mark., Anne Atkins. Joel Edwards and Elaine Storkey disappoint. The rest of the professed Christians are pretty liberal. The chief rabbi is good from the Jewish voice. Lionel Blue is better as a teller of funny stories than anything to do with faith. As for the rest there is gross over-representation of non-Christian religions. These are small minorities in our population. England is constitutionally Christian. It is time the BBC realised it.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
Yes, but the vast majority of th epopulation are non-religious or agnostic. It seems unjust and unfair not to give these people a voice on a radio spot that is established to give us what Rowan Williams woould call moral touchstones.
I'm sorry if you feel beseiged by the heathen hordes but you can be safe in the knowledge that none of us wil lbe taking up space in heaven when you get there and share funny stories with all the speakers of Thought for the Day
You are simply wrong as to how most of our population see themselves. I am not in the habit of reading the grauniad so when I quote it there is an added weight.
"This is a Christian country. Not in the sense that it has an established religion - although in England it has. Not in the sense that we might wish it to be so - it is not this newspaper's role to prescribe such matters of conscience for readers. This is a Christian country simply in the unanswerable sense that most of its citizens think of themselves as Christians. Earlier this month, in a report on the 2001 census, it was revealed that 42 million people in Britain - some 72% of the entire population - stated their religion as Christian. Enter what caveats you like about the figures - that this profession of Christianity may be mostly nominal, that the followers of other faiths must not be excluded, that the profession of any religion, or none, should be a purely private matter - but they are striking none the less. At the very least, they show that the church provides an extensive institutional and collective bond for many more people than we might otherwise imagine in what is often seen as an atomised and secular society."-Guardian editorial:
Please note, the rest of the programme is totally secular so why should the secularists get the religious spot too? Most humanists, agnostics and atheists vehemently deny they have a religion.
Graham - with respect, I think you're missing the point here. The Thought for the Day slot is indeed that: a place where the Today programme steps back from the hurly-burly of politics and shares a thought from a wider moral perspective. To exclude people who are non-religious is saying that non-religious people have no moral thoughts to share. I am a humanist and, like many other humanists, I think deeply about moral issues. The exclusion is therefore something of an insult to the significant number of people (many more than there are of most faith groups) who are also non-religious.
The fact that the rest of the progamme is about topics that are not to do with religion is irrelevant.
The census reveals the vast majority of the population align themselves as religious and overwhelmingly of one particular religion. Humanism dominates the whole ethos of the BBC. Five minutes free from it is not too much to ask IMO.
Post a Comment