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JeremyB

Listed below are comments made by JeremyB between Thursday, 8th January 2009 and Wednesday, 10th June 2009.

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Speaker Week is coming to PM! 5:47pm on 10 Jun 2009 I would like to support the Single Transferable Vote (STV) system for elections. This is not because it would markedly effect the outcome of elections, but because it is MUCH more satisfying for voters and might improve turnout.

First few times I voted was in Northern Ireland under STV which lets you rate as many of the candidates as you want it numerical order. I have felt deprived every time I vote in England since it is very unsatisfying just to register a single X against one candidate.

STV eliminates the need for tactical voting - your vote can still count to block a particularly detested candidate even if your first preference does not win.

STV does not break the constituency system in any way as do alternative "proportional" systems.

Please can the parties (particularly Cameron) stop thinking about voting reform in terms of its effect on election outcomes and start thinking about voter satisfaction and turnout?
Thought for the Day: "a genuinely difficult question" 11:30am on 14 Jan 2009 404. At 8:28pm on 13 Jan 2009, pontiouspirate

I think this analogy does not quite hit the mark - closer would be a programme about politics on which only members of political parties were allowed to contribute. It is generally accepted that floating voters and independents have a valid input to politics as well as the party political hacks.

Damazer's characterisation of the programme's uniqueness is that it is "from a faith perspective". I would argue that having no faith is a "faith perspective". Being opposed to faith, or the influence of faith, is also a "faith perspective". Oddly the Religion and Ethics department seems to agree with this on its excellent bulletin boards and on programmes such as Moral Maze, but not on TftD.
Green Goo.. 09:41am on 14 Jan 2009 Not only Google have disowned this story, the scientist it was attributed to has also. Basically he says The Sunday Times made the kettle "fact" up and attached it to his name.

http://www.technewsworld.com/rsstory/65794.html

Also it is worth noting for perspective that human breathing produces around a gramme of CO2 per minute. More if you are peddling your computer! So even on the invented Sunday Times figures a search is equivalent to around seven minutes breathing. On the real figures, it is well under half a minute.

Of course, the best way for Google, and other global internet companies, to become carbon neutral would be to locate their server "farms" in France where most electricity is produced using nuclear power.
Thought for the Day: "a genuinely difficult question" 2:18pm on 12 Jan 2009 381. At 10:54pm on 11 Jan 2009, happyf1sh.

With all due respect happyf1sh, this is a ludicrous argument.

The BBC does not have the technical ability to exclude anyone from LISTENING to any programme (except accidentally). The issue is that non-religious people are excluded from SPEAKING on it.

I'm guessing that you are Christian, so try to answer honestly: how would you react if Christians were excluded, as a matter of policy, from a programme dealing with moral and ethical issues? (Substitute your actual religion or philosophical stance as necessary).

But you are right about one thing: listening to TftD does reinforce my atheist and humanist beliefs immeasurably when it's not making me choke on my cornflakes in indignation or roll about the floor laughing! To that extent, I suppose it has some value, though I'm not sure they outweigh the health and safety considerations.
Thought for the Day: "a genuinely difficult question" 11:52am on 11 Jan 2009 I think it is becoming obvious to a lot of people here of all shades of opinion that we are dealing with one of those good old British Establishment stitch-ups. This is "genuinely difficult" for Mark Damazer because he is constrained to support an unsupportable position without revealing the true reason why he is supporting it.

It seems likely to me that elements in the BBC have negotiated this secretly with the top levels in the Church of England. I know other religions are involved in Thought for the Day, but the CofE under the current Archbishop of Canterbury has an established strategy of repositioning itself to be the "gatekeeper" for faith in this country, throwing crumbs to the other religions and building them into a "grand alliance" against secularism. Witness the Archbishop’s recent support for sharia law (he overplayed his hand on that one) and the persistent continuation of unelected bishops in the House of Lords (with life peerages tossed to leaders of other religions to keep them happy).

I came to this through Eddie Mair’s invitation on PM not any supposed atheist conspiracy. I think the appearance of secretiveness and conspiracy comes from the BBC’s own unwillingness to promote this debate, which left the atheists, who started it as was their right to do, the only ones promoting it. This has been a radicalising experience for me and I will now be seeking out organised atheism and secularism as action is clearly needed to combat the rise of divisive religious communitarianism in this country.

However I do not think that the regulatory or legal route is sensible here. It is not an effective way to confront the establishment in this country. Also, religious forces can use this route too and we do not want to get into tit-for-tat competitive complaining which engenders a destructive bean-counting approach to broadcasting.

I believe satire and ridicule will be a more effective weapon. I propose a spoof awards process for Thought for the Day along the lines of the Ig Nobel Prize for bad science, the Anti-Tate for bad art or the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. Let’s single out and expose to the light of reason the most egregiously dumb, laugh out loud irrational, clunkiest link from the profane to the sacred, most trendiest vicar cringeworthy, most creative justification of the unjustifiable in religious dogma or practice and best head-in-the-sand pretence that my religion is the only one that actually exists. Mona Siddiqui’s amazing attack on Second Life is only the tip of the iceberg – there is comedy gold in those archives!
Thought for the Day: "a genuinely difficult question" 9:49pm on 10 Jan 2009 What a cop-out! Not only was Mr Damazer not available to answer his critics, but most of the carefully developed criticisms on this blog were not even given an airing. Despite the jokey mock-cringing of the presenters I got the definite impression they were under instructions to close this down as quickly and quietly as possible.

The only non-religious contributor was effectively neutralised by being briefed to deliver another "mock Thought for the Day". She did this very well, but was effectively forced to use her time for an uplifting homily in which she could not address the issue at all. I seem to remember that Richard Dawkins was given the slot "unofficially" once in parallel to the "real" slot and presumably without the involvement of the Religion and Ethics Department. Really, are these people so fundamentalist that it would kill them to commission a humanist thought just once? Just to show willing? Pretty please?

The case for wider inclusion was actually made by a religious speaker, and to be fair he did not pull any punches. It was interesting to hear his claim that the Religion and Ethics Department is so Stalinist that not only do you get banned for not agreeing with religion, you also get banned for not agreeing with the policy of banning people who do not agree with religion!

(I will now be part of an organised campaign as soon as I can find one!)
Thought for the Day: "a genuinely difficult question" 2:36pm on 10 Jan 2009 Dear Mr Damazer,

I have a programme proposal for you: A three minute talk to be inserted into the middle of all religious services broadcast on Radio 4. The brief will be to reflect on religion from a rational perspective and it will be a requirement that all speakers be atheists. The talk will be commissioned and produced by the BBC Science Department and the presenters from the Religion and Ethics Department will introduce it without comment before or after.

Absurd? Of course it is, but no more so than Thought for the Day! You might object that a religious service is not equivalent to the Today Programme and I agree. It has a much smaller audience for one thing. But I am picking up on your defence of Thought for the Day as a religious "right of reply" to a programme with an inbuilt secular bias. The church service certainly has an inbuilt religious bias! Personally I do not think Today has a secular bias, if anything the reverse. A homophobic, racist or misogynist cleric or imam is much less likely to be confronted than a politician or layman with similar views. I'm willing to bet the average bishop gets a much higher proportion of the airtime in a John Humphrys interview than, say, a politician or a scientist. The programme often carries tediously detailed coverage of religious politics, particularly in the Church of England, and of religious interventions in secular controversies.

I hope I have made this a little less of a "genuinely difficult question" for you.

J Hind

(Licence fee payer and not part of any organised campaign.)
Thought for the Day: "a genuinely difficult question" 1:43pm on 09 Jan 2009 207 - Actually some of us (licence payers) are in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. And many people in all of these places (and England for that matter) will have experience of being "educated" in Catholic schools, often in ways just as bad as those described.
Thought for the Day: "a genuinely difficult question" 11:37am on 09 Jan 2009 An interesting observation about the contributions here: If you exclude the obviously unreasonable postings, there is actually common ground between the religious and the atheist perspective. By unreasonable I mean both "I hate religion therefore TftD should be axed or turned over completely to atheists" and "I hate atheism and/or atheists therefore they should continue to be excluded from TftD."

Many of the supporters of TftD say they value the program because of its thoughtfulness, its positivity or because of the intellectual challenge of hearing unfamiliar perspectives. None of this would be threatened by including atheist speakers, indeed the intellectual challenge would be enhanced. Some religious people seem to fear atheist speakers would be negative, but that is a matter for the programme brief not for the speaker's beliefs. Many of the religious speakers would also benefit from a brief to be more positive.

In all the ding-dong between atheists and religionists I hope this key point does not get lost: As far as I am aware, TftD is the only programme on the BBC which systematically and as a matter of policy excludes contributors because of their beliefs. If a programme policy excluded Catholic or Muslim contributors this would certainly be regarded as unacceptable. This discrimination is simply not sustainable in the twenty-first century and the sooner the BBC realises it the better!
Thought for the Day: "a genuinely difficult question" 2:05pm on 08 Jan 2009 I hope Mark Damazer is going to turn up on the programme and not hide behind the usual "nobody was available for comment". If he does, can I suggest two questions:

1. Why do you think that including secular commentators like philosophers, poets, scientists etc. would "detract from the distinctiveness of the slot"? As long as the brief calls for profound thought, reflection and a spiritual, ethical or moral outlook it ought to retain (and even enhance) its distinctiveness.

2. Why is this "a genuinely difficult question" over and above any other issue of balance or scheduling?

I am guessing that the hidden difficulty here is that TftD scheduling is a stitch-up between the BBC and the powers-that-be in the major religions. Including non-religious speakers would re-open the question of the balance between the religions and it might be difficult to get agreement again. If this is the difficulty, I think the BBC should adopt a policy of interacting directly with the licence payers and not assume that religious leaders speak for a "constituency".

(For the record all my postings are my own views and I am not a part of any organised or coordinated campaign. However religions feel free to organise such campaigns so I do not see why atheists shouldn't).

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