Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Cru-Blog on the TV (Again!)
Last Sunday I was back on The Big Questions on BBC One. Thanks to everyone who got in touch and apologies for not posting the link sooner - for some reason it wasn't on the BBC iPlayer until today so I didn't want to post the story before you could watch the show in question. However it is up now so please click here and have a look!
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7 comments:
I watched this on Sunday - I agreed with pretty much everything you said! Especially what you said about questioning religion and the outrage this causes - I agree whole heartedly and this is something I find very frustrating generally. Religion seems to have a monopoly on hurt feelings, entirely unfairly in my opinion.
I found it bizarre to hear some of the Muslims in the room debating how best to interpret scripture etc etc; it feels (for me, as an atheist) so pointless, and I felt like saying, surely it's easier to decide on your own moral code yourself? With your own reasoning, rather than fret about the meanings of words in an ancient book? etc.
As for the sex on TV debate... I was shouting at the god squad myself, they were delusional and quite scary. "Fornication"? WTF?
I find the Big Questions kind of impossible to avoid really, I know I'll get really angry when I watch it but can't seem to stop myself! Well done anyway. Dr Evan Harris was good too.
"Fornication" is an excellent word, and should be used more widely IMO. "What did you get up to last night, Bob [or Alice]?" - "Oh, bit of drinking, bit of chatting, bit of fornicating..."
For some reason, I always think of the word whenever I see formica. I have never fornicated on formica, however. I can't imagine it would be very comfortable.
I try to avoid the Big Questions as it always puts me in a bad mood but I did see a bit of it this time and in between my shouting at the telly I appreciated you making sense. There were a few sensible people on there this week, I missed who the others were though unfortunately (someone from the humanist society I think?). Anyway, thanks for articulating what I try to when I shout at the tv :)
The voices of reason were (to my mind) me, Paul Blanchard from the Labour Humanist Group and Dr Evan Harris MP - who would be my favourite MP except that he supports legalisation of prostitution so sorry he falls to second behind my own MP Dianne Abbott...
Just looked them up and yep, that was them. Thanks, good to know.
Kudos to you Kate for being the most well behaved person there, cutting people appears to be a type of sport on the Big Question. The women suggesting that less sex education was needed struck me as ludicrous and the old chestnut of “they want to teach sex education to 5 year olds” was thoughtlessly thrown in. I am awestruck to think that someone would believe that sex education for young children would be same as that given to teenagers.
I’m not sure what the programme was trying to achieve with the first debate. Although it was very interesting to hear, the issue discussed didn’t appear to go anywhere. Considering the question from the start it seems obvious that no concise answer could ever be reached. Not that I don’t appreciate debate, however, it did seem to be rather fruitless.
Yes I agree Matthew. If we consider Islam to be a religion based on the will of a deity which exists called Allah then we can discuss what Allah means and wants.
But it's not - Allah does not exist. It's a religion based on a book written by a variety of men of varying degrees of education and in a varied range of political situations and interpretted by other men again each variously educated and in different political situations. And clearly none of them well enough educated to have done a science GCSE and twigged that this god nonsense doesn't make sense.
It's like debating whether Harry Potter could fly in the rarified air above altitudes of 10,000 feet. The answer is - you can interpret the books however you want and no doubt make the case for either side but what your missing is that Harry isn't real and magic doesn't exist...
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