Murdoch no match for Benedict in the 'unfit to govern' stakes

This comes from the National Secular Society weekly 'Newsline' for 11th May 2012. Too good to miss. Please feel free to pass on the link:

http://du112w.dub112.mail.live.com/default.aspx#n=1482218471&fid=1&mid=64e92c45-9b4c-11e1-88ff-00237de4a1b0&fv=1

By Alistair McBay 

I have been particularly exasperated in the last few days, in common with many others I'm sure, as a result of the unfolding scandal at the Leveson Inquiry. Like me, you may be astounded at the extent to which the British Government has plumbed new depths of hypocrisy.

Consider the evidence. The non-resident octogenarian Rupert Murdoch is accused of allowing his organisation to conduct gross invasions of personal privacy, and of being personally and directly complicit in covering up these crimes over many years. Murdoch is cross-examined before a committee set up by the Government, his testimonies televised worldwide along with those of his victims and some of his senior staff are arrested. He is accused by a separate Government committee of being "not a fit person" to run a major international organisation which is deemed to be guilty of "huge failings of corporate governance", and whose instinct had been "to cover up rather than seek out wrongdoing and discipline the perpetrators". Murdoch, they said, had "turned a blind eye and exhibited wilful blindness" and "wilful ignorance" to the crimes being committed.

But at least Rupert did admit there was a cover-up. Yes, celebrity telephones were indeed hacked.

Now cast your mind back to September 2010 when another non-resident octogenarian visited the country. Pope Benedict (for it was he) also stands accused of allowing his organisation to conduct gross invasions of personal privacy and of being personally complicit in covering up these crimes over many years, not least when he was plain old Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Did he oversee a culture of 'wilful blindness'? Was he guilty of 'wilful ignorance' of what went on in his organisation? Was the instinct of his organisation "to cover up rather than seek out wrongdoing and discipline the perpetrators?" Purely rhetorical questions all.

But unlike Rupert, Josef was welcomed to Britain at enormous cost to the taxpayer, feted by politicians and royalty alike and revered as a great moral leader of our day. Not one question is put to him about his organisation's record of child abuse and covering it up, far less his own direct role in the cover-up on a global scale and over the decades. No Government committee or independent inquiry calls him unfit for purpose, far less calls him to account to answer charges that the culture of cover-up 'permeated from the top', unless Baroness Warsi challenged him on these matters on her recent Vatican trip. Somehow, I suspect the topic never cropped up – too much mutual respect and admiration getting in the way. In April, the victims of priestly child abuse called for a Government inquiry into his organisation's activities, but the Government silence has been deafening. Wilful blindness? Or it could be that Josef has only admitted to 'errors of judgement' being made by his people and not to an orchestrated cover-up. Maybe Murdoch missed a trick.

So we can draw no other conclusion than this: that the British Government sees hacking into celebrity telephone mailboxes as a greater crime than the brutal and systematic rape of innocent children, and its cover-up, by those entrusted with their care. Religious privilege? Don't get me started!

Atheists, Deists and Theists.

In debates between atheists and the religious, the latter often cite the existence of scientists who are said to have religious beliefs as some sort of rebuttal of atheism and justification of religion. Particular names are mentioned and statements made suggesting that a significant proportion of scientists adhere to one or another religious faith. I think this approach misses the point.

Atheists, and I note Richard Dawkins as an example, are often careful to state that they cannot prove the non-existence of a god, or gods, partly because proving a negative is practically impossible in itself and partly because they recognize that at the start of time conditions were so extreme that science has been unable to gather sufficient evidence about what took place.

Religious believers can broadly be considered under two headings – deists and theists. The former believe, or are prepared to believe, that a Creator set the universe in motion, but then left it to run on its own, the natural processes of cosmological, planetary and biological evolution leading to the universe as we know it today. The latter believe that after initiating the Creation their god continued to exercise an influence on the processes, intervening when thought necessary. Theists believe (or assert they believe) that to this day their god can be induced to change the course of events in response to prayer or other representation.

Innumerable sects of theists exist, each maintaining that only their own sect has ‘the truth’, each collecting financial or other contributions from its adherents and each seeking control over the lives of its own faithful.

Deists can understand, though they lament, the occurrence of natural disasters (such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods and hurricanes). Theists are forced to make awful excuses about why a divinity who is capable of changing the course of events should allow such catastrophes to happen.  

When the existence of a god or gods is under discussion, it seems to me that the real division is not between the religious and atheists, but between theists and those who simply do not believe in the existence of a spirit that intervenes in the natural order of events, be they atheists or deists.