The BBC seems fatally drawn to outspoken, controversial and ultimately, mistaken, flawed characters, otherwise known as charlattans, whom they can rely upon either to make headlines and help them chase ratings, ala Russell Brand, or to ensure the schedules are filled with left wing drudgery ala Owen Jones or Giles Fraser.
Giles Fraser, that turbulent priest with inclinations towards the radical, has some interesting thoughts. Not all of them thought out perhaps.
But still, the BBC seems to think he has something important to say so much of the time.
He is of course, being a Christian, tolerant of the enemy religion…Islam. However he is not tolerant of those who would criticise Islam…
Islamophobia is the moral blind spot of modern Britain
The dinner party bigot’s attack on Islam as a creed can all too easily become an excuse for an attack upon an ethnic group
Yep…not only are you a bigot for criticisng Islam but you are using it as a covert means to attack a particular race…not sure which as there are so many different races who are Muslims…and of course he forgets to mention Sikhophobia and Hinduophobia and Whirling Dervishophobia and so on…all practised mainly by people of a non-white persuasion….so why aren’t these bigoted, secret racists denouncing those religions as well around the dinner table?
People like Fraser like to tell the lie that Islam is the religion of peace, that Islam means peace, that Islam wasn’t spread by the sword.
However when it comes to Christianity he is more open about the connection between religion, fanatics and violence…..
The English, of course, have always been a little bit awkward when it comes to full-throttle Christianity…It wasn’t always this way. Thousands were butchered during the Civil War in the name of their different understandings of God – probably the last flowering of popular religious fundamentalism in England.
When religious ideology got as toxic as it did, it was an act of genius to redefine religion as being primarily about pastoral care. From the 18th Century onwards, Christianity ceased to be about pike-toting revolutionaries hoping to rebuild Jerusalem in here in England.
Instead, through the Church of England, it increasingly became a David Cameron-type faith: the religion of good deeds.
It served the English well. It was dignified, socially useful and largely undemanding. The big society in action.
Fraser admits religion can inspire violence…even Christianity, a religion in which there are no exhortations to conquer the world or to kill your enemy.
Religion had to be neutered in order for a peaceful, tolerant society to blossom.
However Fraser hankers after the old school hellfire and damnation interpretation of the Bible….
….. it is offensive and scandalous stuff. It means being brave, taking risks, standing up to wrong, even when – and this is bound to happen – it is personally distressing for us to do
that. It means real belief and absolute commitment. It is so much more than a brief nod to Sunday school truisms.
‘real belief and absolute commitment’….dangerous, foolish stuff….if he’s advocating this for Christians how can he deny the same to Muslims or any other religion or belief such as Fascism or Communism? It would be a nation at war with itself.
Real belief is nothing less than fundamentalism, extremism, oppressive institutionalised tyranny.
Real belief is bigotry of the purest kind…‘I am right, you are wrong…and so you are going to hell…and I might just help to speed you on your way there.’
Fraser expands on his desire for hellfire on earth with the thought that terrorism might have his divine sanction if in a ‘just’ cause….curious when he admitted above that religion had become toxic and led to thousands being brutally butchered in the name of God and yet he now justifies it……
If we can have just war, why not just terrorism?
I was criticised for suggesting there could be a moral right of resistance to oppression but Christianity has thought a great deal about the idea of just resistance.
The weird thing about this is that Christianity has thought a great deal about the idea of just resistance. The Reformation, for instance, saw a flurry of moral justifications for resistance to the state, when that state is seeking to impose on its subjects its own particular understanding of religious faith. In 1574, for example, Theodore Beza published his The Right of Magistrates in which he affirmed the right of resistance – and violent resistance in the final instance – to state tyranny.
Ah…there’s that Christian inspired violence again….‘Christianity has thought a great deal about the idea of just resistance.’ I wonder if Islam has ‘thought a great deal about the idea of just resistance’?
However Fraser isn’t keen on ‘Just’ Torture, even if it were the kind that might save lives whilst not killing the person being tortured, merely being ‘enhanced interrogation’.…
It was called “tortura del agua” by the Spanish Inquisition. The Nazis used it, as did the Japanese and the Vietcong. We now call it waterboarding, and all reasonable people would also call it torture. That is, except — because it is a technique now widely practised by the CIA, and because the United States wants to claim that it does not torture prisoners — that the current US administration calls it an “enhanced interrogation technique”. Once again, Mr Bush’s dodgy dictionary finds new ways to lie.
This is what makes the war on terror such a well of moral evil.
I love the United States, but its moral conscience has been diseased by the war on terror. It is now time for American churches to speak out more clearly.
So…torture, however much it might save lives, is a ‘well of moral evil’ that is condoned and practised by minds diseased by the war on terror….but terrorism that deliberately, knowingly and cold bloodedly kills thousands, men, women and children, at a stroke, is a ‘just’ terrorism if in a morally justifiable cause.
So let’s get Fraser right…religion can be a toxic, brutal, murderous tyranny and yet anyone who dares link Islam to the violent exhortations and ‘racism’ in the Koran is an Islamophobe?
Waterboarding, stress positions, shouting at prisoners and other intensive interrogation techniques are morally evil but butchering the Fogel family, hacking off a baby’s head, is a ‘just’ terrorism?
Fraser is a classic example of Doublethink…when you can hold two opposing and contradictory views and yet believe totally in both of them….
To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.
The BBC must adore little Fraser…pro-Muslim, anti-Bush, anti the war on terror, anti-interrogation, anti-capitalism, anti-Islamophobia……he could have a channel all to himself….a circus dog indeed, all too happy to jump through the hoops, peddling the codswallop, and needing no commands to do so.
Shame he’s such a hypocrite, such an advocate of violence, intolerance and religious fanaticism.