Tag Archives: UK

Events

Michael Behe will be lecturing in the UK this November

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Story from Evolution News.

Excerpt:

Controversial ID Scientist tours UK
Professor Michael Behe, a key figure in the Intelligent Design (ID) movement, will challenge his critics in a lecture tour of the UK in November.

Prof. Behe is one of an increasing number of scientists who believe that modern biochemical evidence undermines the basis of Darwinian evolution. The author of two ground-breaking books on ID – ‘Darwin’s Black Box‘ (1996) and ‘The Edge of Evolution‘ (2007) – Behe’s theory of irreducible complexity has drawn attacks from many neo-Darwinists, but not one of them has been able to refute it.

As Behe himself writes, in the years since the publication of ‘Darwin’s Black Box’, “the scientific argument for design is stronger than ever. Despite the enormous progress of biochemistry in the intervening years… despite implacable opposition from some scientists at the highest levels, the book’s argument for design stands… there is very little of the original text I would change if I wrote it today.

“In short, as science advances relentlessly, the molecular foundation of life… is getting exponentially more complex. As it does, the case for the intelligent design of life becomes exponentially stronger.”

Behe’s ‘Darwin or Design? What Does the Science Really Say?’ tour runs from 20-27 November and will comprise evening lectures at the Babbage Lecture Theatre in Cambridge and the Caledonian University in Glasgow, plus events in London, Belfast and Leamington/Warwick. He will also be the main speaker at a day conference (27 November) at Oxford Brookes University.

The tour is organised by the UK-based Centre for Intelligent Design, which exists to promote the public understanding of ID.

For more details of the tour and booking information see: www.darwinordesign.org.uk

Michael Behe is one of my favorite intelligent design speakers.

News

Over 250,000 children accused of racism by UK teachers since 2000

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The UK government is forcing teachers to accuse 3-year-old children of racism. (H/T The Blog Prof)

Excerpt:

Teachers are being forced to report children as young as three to the authorities for using alleged ‘racist’ language, it was claimed last night.

Munira Mirza, a senior advisor to London Mayor Boris Johnson, said schools were being made to spy on nursery age youngsters by the Race Relations Act 2000.

More than a quarter of a million children have been accused of racism since it became law, she said.

Writing in Prospect magazine, she said: ‘The more we seek to measure racism, the more it seems to grow.

‘Teachers are now required to report incidents of racist abuse among children as young as three to local authorities, resulting in a massive increase of cases and reinforcing the perception that we need an army of experts to manage race relations from cradle to grave.

[…]The Act compelled 43,000 public authorities, including schools and churches, ‘to promote good relations between persons of different racial groups’. Details of the incidents are logged on databases.

Teachers are allowed to report racism even if the alleged ‘victim’ was not offended or if the child does not understand what they were saying.

Freedom of Information replies obtained by civil liberties group the Manifesto Club show that between 2002 and 2009, 280,000 incidents have been reported.

Wow. The government is criminalizing more and more behaviors behaviors in order to create a “crisis” that requires more and more government intervention. This policy was put in by the left-wing Labour party in the UK, naturally. The Nanny-staters who want to micro-manage everyone to play nice.

And before anyone accuses me of being a racist, know that I am a brown person. So that left-wing name-calling doesn’t work on me.

News

Pro-life protesters arrested and detained in UK

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Story here in the UK Telegraph. (H/T Suzanne)

Excerpt:

Andy Stephenson, 35, and Kathryn Sloane, 19, both committed Christians, were detained after a peaceful protest outside a publicly-funded abortion clinic.

The Crown Prosecution Service will decide next month whether to press charges against the pair for causing ‘harassment, alarm or distress’ under the Public Order Act.

[…]The pair were arrested last month as they held a banner aloft outside Wistons abortion clinic in Brighton.

Police were called by a member of staff concerned that patients entering the clinic felt traumatised and upset.

Officers asked Mr Stephenson and Miss Sloane to take down a 7ft by 5ft placard depicting an aborted eight-week-old embryo – which they duly did but only to replace it with another banner showing a 10-week-old foetus.

The pair were arrested and taken to Brighton police station where they were held until three in the morning.

Mr Stephenson, a father-of-two and a carpenter, from Worthing in East Sussex, said: “We went to the clinic because we know what women are going in there for and it seems the obvious place to hold a protest.

“We had no desire to be arrested but we sincerely believe this is a legal form of demonstration.

“We were arrested around midday. We were taken to the local police station where we were treated like common criminals.

“They took our fingerprints and put us in cells – they didn’t interview us until midnight and we weren’t let out until three in the morning.”

The UK is a party dominated by secular humanists on the political left. Their desire for selfish pleasure is so strong that they look upon any attempt to disagree with them or make them feel bad about what they are doing as a punishable offense. Secular humanists are very clear about what they believe. They believe that life is about the pursuit of happy feelings. They have no concept of human rights like the right to free speech in their atheistic worldview. So if you interrupt them in their pursuit of pleasure and draw attention to the destruction they are causing, they will attack you. They believe that the strong have a right to crush and coerce the weak into serving their desires for happiness.

To a secular humanist, everyone else exists as a depersonalized object to be used and thrown away. Other people have no value – and there is no such thing as virtue or a way humans “ought to be”. It’s is very much a Darwinian struggle to use the people around you in order to have the most happiness you can until you die. Morality is is just the fashion of the time and place – it’s not real. There is no standard of conduct. You obey the fashions of your place and time unless you can somehow break the rules and avoid being caught and sanctioned. Ethics is illusory on secular humanism. It’s just traffic laws and personal preferences.

The same people who oppose pro-lifers today would have opposed the abolition of slavery. The situation is identical. Declare a group of weaker, disadvantaged people to be non-persons, and then exploit them. Anyone who is pro-abortion (i.e. – who votes for left-wing parties like the Democrats) is pro-slavery. Period. The principle of abusing and killing the weak for your own happiness is the common denominator between both views. Only in a theistic universe do persons have human rights granted by God, like the right to life, and the right to free speech. In an atheistic universe, rights can be brushed aside by the strong.