Imams, priests, rabbis and other religious figures will have to enrol in a “national register of faith leaders” and be subject to government-specified training and security checks in the Home Office’s latest action on extremism.
What version of what Sky Fairy someone wants to worship or believe in, and who they decide to listen as to the nature of said Sky Fairy, is not something to be listed, registered or administrated by government.
Fuck off mateys.
I’ve long said (I said it at the UKIP candidate selection hustings way back in 2007 for example) that I’m slightly worried about bearded nutters trying to murder us all in our beds. But that’s as nothing to the fear I have of the Home Office and the authorities in general in reaction to said threat. It’s far more likely that we lose our freedoms and liberties (such as worshipping the Sky Fairy of our choice without government selection of who helps us do so) through the reaction than it is we get blown up by the nutters.
Got a cheer and a round of applause (at Ukip recall) for saying so too.
And it really does seem that someone has forgotten their ecclesiastical history as well. The Catholic Church has spent what, a millennium or more shouting that it, the religious authority, will appoint priests and bishops, not the secular authorities?
The Papsits won’t join: but state approval of imams is quite normal in the Arab world. Odd that Britain should be taking rules from that source rather than the other, eh?
And the Free Church(es) of Scotland.
Priests and rabbis a concern to the security services, are they? Or just the imams?
The politicians are even more scared of the SJW crazies on Twatter than they are of the bearded nutters. So they have to pretend that they’re watching all those militant rabbis and CofE vicars plotting to blow up our commuter trains.
Is there any problem that a government registration scheme can’t solve? Give a civil servant an issue to tackle and out comes the same old Maslow’s Hammer, every time.
http://www.theonion.com/article/no-one-murdered-because-of-this-image-29553
Mentally retarded imams (forgive the tautology) will have no trouble outwitting our mentally retarded Home Office (forgive the tautology). The imams will just act moderate when interviewed by the Home Office, then go off and preach Jihad.
Removing the tax breaks for religious charities and scrutinising donations from abroad would do more: put them in the same financial category as astrologers, spirit mediums and shamans.
If it only saves one life, then there’s no reason the local vicar shouldn’t be subjected to a rigorous security vetting and approval process. It’s the only rational solution.
Think of the children, people!
Matthew L – I LOLed.
All religions should just tell the state to fuck off.
The solutions to imams is to allow no more in and to ensure their “congregation” can afford no more than 2 kids so their numbers decline with the rest of us. Stopping benefits for more than 2 kids would be an excellent start.
will have to enrol in a “national register of faith leaders” and be subject to government-specified training and security checks
No way this could have unintended consequences once civil servants and/or future politicians get to define “extremist behaviour”.
If this extends as far as lay preachers, anyone who can officiate in some element of a religious service, people who lead prayer meetings and study groups* then the list gets very big pretty quickly.
* Plenty of Bible study and prayer groups take place with no “faith leader with an official badge on”, especially if you count student societies. Do they have to present a chairman or secretary or something so that registration can take place? (Similar problem for the Quakers really.) Extremist imams are apparently only a minor concern – most radicalisation (of Muslims and converts) takes place in prayer groups and private study groups, often in prisons or colleges rather than associated with a mosque at all. If they stick to “badged” religious leaders then they will still have to cast their net absurdly wide but miss out these sort of cells where most radicalisation occurs. But if they want to include these groups then we are talking a whole new level of state intrusion.
And my previous post excludes radicalisation online, goodness knows how you deal with people overseas, but do you require every Brit who posts a video featuring religious content to register? Their potential audience is both larger (even if it’s just shared by a few hundred people, pretty much zilch in youtube terms) and more vulnerable than a typical imam’s.
Extremism as defined by the Home Office since 2009: “vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs. We also include in our definition of extremism calls for the death of members of our armed forces, whether in this country or overseas”.
The trouble with the bearded nutters is twofold. Firstly the murdering in beds. A certain very low level of that (by various nutters, not just bearded ones) is part of the price of a free society.
The second is the sheer demographic threat, which not only gives nutters of the bearded variety a hiding place, but puts cultural pressure on the entire continent to “respect” Islam, and ultimately to submit to it. Which is why, as an unrepentant multiculturalist, I am against having more muslims. Because Islam is monocultural, and it’s not a culture I like.
It’s OK to not tolerate intolerance, even if you are a liberal. How you can get that message past the PC police, I don’t know.
“Which is why, as an unrepentant multiculturalist, I am against having more muslims. Because Islam is monocultural”
“It’s OK to not tolerate intolerance”
I got the first bit fine, but then…
“It’s OK to not tolerate intolerance”
It is a beautiful line, isn’t it?
Simply define anything you don’t like as intolerance & away you go. The world’s your oyster.
@bnis,
You’re talking bullshit.
As a technically apostate muslim, the party line is that I should have my head cut off. A substantial minority of British muslims agree that’s the right thing to do – a (fortunately vastly smaller) minority would be prepared to do it.
It’s pretty easy to make the case that that is not tolerant. If you want to make cases for other ideologies being intolerant go ahead, but don’t lazily assume that everyone labelling an ideology as intolerant is doing so on a non-rational basis of some vague dislike.
Don’t accommodate anyone who does not accept the three underlying principles of liberal democracy:
Equality before the law(not shariah) including sexuality, race, gender, atheist/skyfairyist/apostate
Freedom of speech: giving offence should be a right. If you disagree, engage in rational argument not violence or threats of it
Freedom of conscience: no one has to accept under threat of violence their father’s religion, choice of husband/clothing/lifestyle
Rights are given to the individual within society not any larger group
I’d rather that we just expelled all sky pilots who are not part of churches by law established. True, that means they can all hang out in Wales and Norn Ireland, but that’s a feature.
Look BiG, i have absolutely no problem with intolerance. I’ve never seen an example of intolerance, didn’t have an entirely rational basis behind it. One might even say, any workable society’s built on intolerance. Of those things would prevent it working.
So any society is built on some value of ““It’s OK to not tolerate intolerance” It tells you absolutely nothing about the quality of that society, assessing “quality” from any other viewpoint.
So it’s just smug nonsense.
This whole kerfuffle comes about from wanting to ban an ideology. But you can’t send an idea to prison, it is hard to regulate the transmission of ideas without grossly impeding free speech, and it is impossible to look inside the heart of a man to see what they “really” believe.
BiG
“As a technically apostate muslim, the party line is that I should have my head cut off.”
But that’s simply not true, at least not any more than it is for the poor girl that escaped from the hippy commune at 16 Acacia Avenue.
You do not live in an Islamic state. The law is German (in your case?), not Islamic. That’s it.
Then LjH’s post above. And if the law does not support those principles, then leave that state, on the boat after the one I just took.
If you want to understand what happens when you stop tolerating intolerance, go and listen to those idiot fruitcakes in the EU Parliament that (a year or so ago) were try to impose just that (a law against intolerance), but in their case trying to gain advantage over those who might look to oppose their insane attempts in pursuit of a USE, or whatever else that might get in their way in that context.
“vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty”
Well that’s most of the House of Commons in prison then.
“As a technically apostate muslim, the party line is that I should have my head cut off. A substantial minority of British muslims agree that’s the right thing to do – a (fortunately vastly smaller) minority would be prepared to do it. ”
You imply Biggie that the majority of muslims would not want to cut your head off. Agreed. But the missing phrase is “if they have a choice about it”
If their demographic gets big enough and remains under the thumb of the clerics ( and I see no signs of that yoke being thrown off), then when the time comes they will do what they are told. Including cutting your head off. They won’t like it but they will do it cos they are ordinary people and the chief characteristic of that is doing what the “authoratees” (imagine Cartmann) tell them to do.
Your adopted homeland was, back in the day, full of people who didn’t want to do or participate in the horrors Adolf had lined up for them but they did it anyway.
I prefer to say its a human right to be offended by the views of others.
Because it means you are free to have any views and opinions of your own. Such views might offend others, but that is their problem, not yours, and how are you to know what offends some people.
I reckon the people most at risk at the moment are the nominal Muslims who grew up in Muslim families but figured out in their teens that the Koran has good stuff, but isn’t the total solution for how to live your life on earth.
They can’t have a bit of banter with their hard-core friends along the lines of ‘are you still starving yourself for a month in the long northern summer day to get a discount’ in the same way you can tease a Lent or New Year’s resolution observer.
The followers aren’t the root of the problem, and that includes the “badged officials”.
It’s the Gods that should be called in, registered and bound over to keep the peace.
Lowering the tone just a little…
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/09/13/watch-im-my-own-prophet-topless-feminist-storms-stage-at-muslim-conference/
@Mr Ecks,
I am in complete and total agreement with you.
If they want to set up some minimum standards for the imams that Saudi are shipping to the country, then I’d support that. And if it affected other religions trying to send in people whose only training was in fanaticism, then that would be fine too.
It would be nice to have proper courses in Islam at UK universities – where students had to actually do critical analysis of the Qu’ran and Hadith and argue with each other on exegesis and translation. That is, the sort of things that Christians routinely do before getting the approval of mainstream churches.
Sure, you’d get a few fanatics made more fanatical, but you’d also get a lot of people introduced to other traditions within their faith and made a lot less dogmatic by seeing people sincerely disagree with them on the basis of faith – it’s much harder to assume that everyone who disagrees with you is inspired by Shaitan when the person disagreeing with you is the guy you eat lunch with.
RG: the whole premise of the Koran is that Gabriel dictated it to Mo and as such is perfect and unalterable. How long before faculty gets beheaded?
What MBE said.
My local parish church has well over a dozen Bible Study groups (and some have joint leaders and periodically leaders take a sabbatical), a Sunday School with Sunday School teachers (more than one per class, to provide cover for holidays/sickness), lay preachers, ex-churchwardens who lead services on occasion. occasional preachers (some of whom are preparing to become lay preachers) – that’s about 50 people in one parish church alone.
The register would be so big that it couldn’t be adequately supervised.
Richard Gadsden – “It would be nice to have proper courses in Islam at UK universities – where students had to actually do critical analysis of the Qu’ran and Hadith and argue with each other on exegesis and translation.”
The older universities have precisely such departments. They are usually split these days and relations are bad. On the one hand, the Middle East has despots who are funding their own Islamic studies centres which focus on a more ….. traditional approach to Islam. On the other, they have young academics raised on a diet of Edward Said who insist that anything but a complete identification with and support for Islamic radicals is racism.
So Oxford now has the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. Which has at least one moderate but he is the exception. While the more old fashioned approach is taught in the Oriental Institute. I would guess the two do not speak much.
Reminds me of a scene in a book where some Muslims deciding to protest by reading out a passage from the Koran at a public event in originL Arabic and then English have 2 problems, only one of them can actually read it in Arabic and for the English version which translation should they use, an argument that takes weeks to resolve.
john77: it’s even worse in the Quakers – we don’t have faith leaders, and every member can officiate.