Rev George Pitcher - hilarious

George Pitcher, reverend-cum-journalist, has slapped the wrists of the BHA and the NSS for being “barrels of laughs”. (He is being sarcastic.)

The alleged humourless faux pas committed by the two organisations consists in criticising  the rationale of Cherie Booth QC when she gave a suspended sentence to a man found guilty of a violent attack on the basis that he was “a religious person”.

The wife of former Prime Minister Tony Blair had leniently declared at Inner London Crown Court:

I am going to suspend this sentence for the period of two years based on the fact you are a religious person and have not been in trouble before.

You caused a mild fracture to the jaw of a member of the public standing in a queue at Lloyds Bank. You are a religious man and you know this is not acceptable behaviour.

Obviously he forgot this on the day of the crime.

(And anyway, the defendant only hit the victim hard enough to cause a “mild” fracture. And who doesn’t hate, queuing, right?)

The passing of lenient sentences for actual bodily harm based on the religious belief of the attacker is of course pant-wettingly hilarious. And this explains the Reverend Pitcher’s bewilderment that humanists and secularists might deign to comment on the judgement without crackin’ bare jokes.

However, the BHA and NSS argument is not that there are never grounds for leniency in sentencing. It’s not even that this particular sentence itself was necessarily wrong. Rather it is that religious belief per se should not be the grounds on which the decision is made. It seems George does in fact grasp this basis of complaint, but he therefore goes out of his way to argue that possession of a religious belief qua religious belief really is a sufficient pivot on which to turn a judgement. Being a reverend he puts this in terms which are both compassionate and concise:

what the humourless and po-faced bozos of the BHA and NSS have to get into their restricted imaginations is the answer to this question: Do adherents to a major faith have demonstrable, objective and tangible standards of behaviour towards others enshrined in their religious traditions, to which they can and should be expected to aspire because they are accountable to their divine authority, that are not so prescribed by secular authorities?

(That’s a real quote, by the way. He’s a paid writer!)

Now, one could point out that one adherent’s objective moral tenet is always a heresy to another; that on occasion rather immoral acts follow all too tangibly from religious belief; and that the existence of inconsistent moral behaviour between religions and within religions is beyond demonstrable.

However,  it would perhaps be more educational to list a few of the positive principles which George alleges secular “authorities” cannot prescribe. There are human rights, for example, prescribed by that secular document which is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. There are the many principles of modern liberalism which we inherit quite directly from the work of the humanists Jeremy Bentham and J S Mill. There is the principle of separation of church and state, which we get from secularists like Locke, Jefferson and Voltaire. Oh yes, and there are the principles of justice and civil equality,  which hold that everyone should be equal in the eyes of the law.

‘Nuff said.

Anyway, George, don’t worry about the immortal GSOHs of humanists. We happen to know that BHA staff occasionally gather round and have a good old chuckle at your blog.