Church of England to fight “New Atheism”
Clergy are to be urged to be more vocal in countering the arguments put forward by a more hard-line group of atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, who have campaigned for a less tolerant attitude towards religion.
A report endorsed by Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, warns that the Church faces a battle to prevent faith being seen as “a social problem” and says the next five years are set to be a period of “exceptional challenge”.
It expresses concern that Christians are facing hostility at work and says the Church could lose its place at the centre of public life unless it challenges attempts to marginalise religious belief.
The rallying call comes amid fears that Christians are suffering from an increasing level of discrimination following a series of cases in which they have been punished for sharing their beliefs.
Of course there is no reflection here in the Telegraph that those “fears” are only that; that the desperate, media-friendly trickle of court cases is being brought by one pressure organisation; and that they keep losing on all substantive points because the far from these hand-picked Christians being discriminated against they are in fact the ones discriminating and that’s why they end up in court in the first place.
Church of England to fight “New Atheism”,
A big difference exists between sharing faith and being downright discriminatory because of religious belief.
Just look at today’s case of Christian podiatrist Steve Hardie, of Peterborough.
A HPC panel heard that Mr Hardie was “rude and obnoxious” to two men he believed were a couple, failed to treat a man he deemed “effeminate” and asked a colleague to treat a patient he believed to be gay.
He was found guilty of misconduct towards patients he perceived were gay, his only defence was his Christian faith.
Christians twist stories like this and say they are the discriminated party, because they don’t have the right to discriminate
Its a bit like the KKK moaning because the cant lynch black people any more.
I’m doing an Open University subject on religion, and as usual they’re encouraging bending over backwards to be understanding of all religious beliefs. There is not a iota of bias, no matter how bizarre or violent a religious belief or group is – they even give Al Qaeda a sympathetic write-up.
But then there’s a section on New Atheists – talk about biased. The only quote is by someone writing against them. The section is used to give an explanation of creationism and intelligent design, with no information on why they are a load of rubbish. And it mentions the atheist bus campaign, giving equal space to the Christian response and with no mention of the face that members of the public donated to the campaign, examination of why people might feel moved to donate to it etc. It was so disappointing to see this from the OU; I thought they would be above the “religious people deserve respect, atheists don’t” attitude of most of society but apparently not…
Karen- I think you should bring this to the attention of those responsible for the course materials.
Can I ask which OU course? The Secular-OU group recently discussed GA063 Respecting religious diversity at work.
http://groups.google.com/group/secular-ou/
Hi Karen, we at Secular-OU would be very interested to know which course you refer to. If as you say the material is overtly biased we will bring a complaint forward.
Perhaps once you’ve concluded your course you might be willing to send the offending coursebooks to us through the post so that we might assess the level of bias and perhaps run it past some people at the BHA.
We would of course return the books to you as soon as possible, once we have made our assessment.
Don’t know how the Church is going to fight Athiesm…they don’t have any evidence to back up a word they say, simple as that….slowly but surely religion is going the way it should…to the fiction section of every library
They will fight it by digging their claws in to the education system and trying to enforce their belief structure on all of us through influencing laws and political decision making.