Sue Bailey

1. “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”
2. Friday nights (absolute me time)
3. Birthdays (you should be spoiled unmercifully)
4. My computer (people who snoop deserve to find stuff that upsets them)
5. My laundry basket (I don’t want your dirty socks, and you don’t want mine)
6. My bank account (if you’ve ever heard a woman ask her husband for money to buy him a birthday present, you’ll never have a joint account)
7. Your right to say what you like; my right to say “not on my blog”.
8. New Year’s Eve
9. The ballot box
10. Being told the truth (I’d rather be hurt than lied to, a million times over. No one ever gets this.)

And you?

Is it being Sunday that brings all the religious stories out? These two bear an uncanny similarity:

[A nurse] in Exeter said she has been removed from front-line duties for refusing to remove a crucifix. But the Royal Devon and Exeter NHS Trust said its uniform and dress code prohibited front-line staff wearing any type of necklace. The trust said it would only be acceptable to wear a crucifix pinned inside a uniform lapel or pocket. The trust said it had tried to find a compromise, but wearing a crucifix was not a “requirement of Christian faith”.
Via

Tesco has been accused of religious discrimination after the company ordered the founder of a Jedi religion to remove his hood or leave a branch of the supermarket in north Wales. [...] Tesco said: “He hasn’t been banned. Jedis are very welcome to shop in our stores although we would ask them to remove their hoods. Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yoda and Luke Skywalker all appeared hoodless without ever going over to the Dark Side and we are only aware of the Emperor as one who never removed his hood. If Jedi walk around our stores with their hoods on, they’ll miss lots of special offers.”
Via

Gotta give Tesco points for that superb response.

Stolen from Sevitz.

Remember the olden days when half of blogging was “hey, look at this”. I don’t need to do that any more: I’ve got Stumble and Google Shared Items and if it’s really good I can Twitter it. Which means I don’t get to do this:

Geds is amazing. Utterly, utterly amazing. Sometimes I think he’s writing my life but with more insight and more perspective than I’ll ever be able to manage.

I kept using break up terms to describe the end of my faith. “It was an abusive relationship,” I said. “God and I just need some time apart.”

Somewhere in the back of my mind I think I expected the phone to ring some day. It would be god. Asking me back. I had a list of suspects who I figured would take on the role of “Voice of god.” I braced myself, just waiting.

My phone never rang.

That’s how it was.

I was prepared to cry, and I did, in buckets. I wasn’t prepared, though, to be utterly gobsmacked by the content of Obama’s speech.

The “we will restore science to its rightful place” was – as delivered – almost throwaway. Which is as it should be. Running government on provable facts isn’t something we should have to fight for, despite the last eight years.

And then it got better. America is “a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and nonbelievers.” There’s a president I can believe in.

File this one under ‘almost too ironic to be true’: a Catholic priest has been criticised by parents for telling their children that Father Christmas doesn’t exist.

I do recall that my own parents played this one very well: Father Christmas was *never* true, even when I was tiny; he was a game we played, but I never for one moment thought that he was real, which left all my belief available for the Baby Jesus. Nice.

In other seasonal news, as the shopping season is now almost over, I am switching my musical loathing from the TV commercial overdose of It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas to my traditional hatred for those wretched lines from Once in Royal David’s City:

Christian children all should be
mild, obedient, good as He.

Grrr.

My eBay account manager sent me an email today containing this image* of a so-called “Christmas” “Tree”. As a tree-worshipper, I found this extremely offensive. Suppose I celebrated my holiday with an image of the Baby Jesus cut off at the ankles and adorned with baubles!

Of course, it is only a few weeks since we had the travesty of a religious festival that is Hallowe’en. How do you think witches feel when, on the one night of the year that they are allowed out, the streets are filled with children in ill-fitting costumes with bags stuffed with sweets? It’s about time that we showed them some respect and banned plastic pumpkins, and returned to the real meaning of Hallowe’en with some goat-sacrifice, sky-clad dancing and suggestiveness with broomsticks.

* The factually accurate part of this post ends here.

Some things don’t even need a comment.

The Rt Rev Patrick O’Donoghue, the [Catholic] Bishop of Lancaster… [says] “What we have witnessed in Western societies since the end of the Second World War is the development of mass education on a scale unprecedented in human history [...] these intellectual trends have resulted in a fragmented society that marginalizes God, with many people mistakenly thinking they can live happy and productive lives without him.”

It reminds me of this overheard conversation:

“If you get a bachelor’s degree,” the seasoned student reassured, “you’ll probably be okay. But my professor said that when you get a master’s, and definitely if you go beyond that, you can lose your values. He said that college students have to be watchful because if you get too much education, you could turn – LIBERAL. He’s seen it happen to a lot of good Christians.”

And for the sake of balance, here are several hundred arguments for the existence of god. If I had to buy anyone’s line, it would be Ben Franklin’s: “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.”

The British Humanist Association is going to run adverts on the sides of London bendybuses. The posters will read There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.

That “probably” will – almost certainly – raise a few eyebrows if not a few mocking laughs: are atheists not so sure of their beliefs then? It turns out that it’s a requirement of the bus company’s advertising policies that adverts must not offend religious people. I’m not convinced that “probably” will be enough mitigation to avoid offending those who want to be offended, but it does add a tongue-in-cheek note that’s particularly pleasing in contrast to “repent, sinner, the end is nigh” and other such self-confident slogans.

But perhaps the most pleasing aspect of the story was the spokesman for pressure group Christian Voice who told the BBC that “people don’t like being preached at.”

Amen, brother. Amen.