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How to stop Jehova's Witnesses?
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Ooperlooper


Posts: 104
Joined: Jun 2006
Post: #1
03-12-2007 12:38 AM

Another news report said they stopped her speaking not because it was "too religeous" but rather "too polemic". Indeed it doesn't seem to me to be a very well reasoned argument, more of a rant.

Okay for internet forums but probably not whay the organisation wanted to come across.

She starts off talking about primary age "Christian children", which, as debated earlier in this thread, is arguably rather oxymoronic.

As for whether the kids care about being forced to say grace with or without the word "Lord"...well she obviously doesn't remember much about what it's like to be that age.

She then talks about a muslim girl's legal challenge for the right to wear a headscarf at school. But if you allow a headscarf on the grounds of one belief, why not allow an atheist to wear what they want (say, jeans and a t-shirt), or a West Ham fan to wear their West Ham top? I suspect the school was probably only trying to be practical and fair to everyone, rather than trying to be anti-religious.

She then goes on to suggests that BA banned a woman from wearing a crucifix because the company is run by "God bashers". I think she'll find the company's motive is more likely to be making money, and it's actually because the passengers (of all manner of religions and beliefs) prefer to fly on an airline where the flight attendants are there to keep you happy rather than to promote their own beliefs.

Next, when she suggests that all of the above institutions have "beef with any belief system other than their own Godless one", she seems to be telling us that; a) companies, local authorities and the like have religious beliefs, which is pretty absurd, and b) that avoiding favouring or offending any one particular religion is the same as atheism, which it's clearly not.

She then whinges about mockery - her point, ironically, seeming to be that she would like to rescind the right to freedom of speech.

After all this, she at last makes a reasonable point about the distinction between, say, a school avoiding words like 'Christmas' altogether, and teaching kids about multiple beiefs and customs.

But she then returns to form, claiming that equal rights should apply to beliefs and actions in the same way that it applies to inherent properties such as race, sexual orientation or gender, which is pretty self-evidently unreasonable and unworkable.

It's just a rather dumb speech.

On a related note, just before I finished working at a London local authority about three years ago, I received an internal communications email stating that (I kid ye not) people who followed religions were entitled to an extra three days off per year. The message was accompanied by an enormous list of dates of supposed religious significance (most of the Christian ones, I'd never heard of) from which you had to pick. Atheists were apparently not entitled to these days off!

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Messages In This Topic
RE: How to stop Jehova's Witnesses? - roz - 09-11-2007, 08:19 AM
RE: How to stop Jehova's Witnesses? - PVP - 09-11-2007, 10:04 AM
RE: How to stop Jehova's Witnesses? - BT - 10-11-2007, 08:50 AM
RE: How to stop Jehova's Witnesses? - roz - 10-11-2007, 10:07 AM
RE: How to stop Jehova's Witnesses? - roz - 10-11-2007, 05:33 PM
RE: How to stop Jehova's Witnesses? - roz - 24-11-2007, 11:06 PM
RE: How to stop Jehova's Witnesses? - roz - 25-11-2007, 12:15 PM
RE: How to stop Jehova's Witnesses? - roz - 27-11-2007, 08:07 AM
RE: How to stop Jehova's Witnesses? - roz - 27-11-2007, 07:59 PM
RE: How to stop Jehova's Witnesses? - Ian - 27-11-2007, 10:41 PM
RE: How to stop Jehova's Witnesses? - roz - 29-11-2007, 03:24 PM
RE: How to stop Jehova's Witnesses? - roz - 29-11-2007, 08:26 PM
RE: How to stop Jehova's Witnesses? - Ooperlooper - 03-12-2007 12:38 AM
RE: How to stop Jehova's Witnesses? - roz - 03-12-2007, 08:46 AM