Virtual Methodist

And another thing... There was a distinct dearth of posts on this site last week... First because I had a backlog of boxes to empty following our house-move and I had a lot to wrap up before knocking off for a bit of a break... But just because I wasn't posting stuff, doesn't mean there wasn't a lot going on in the rice pudding that passes for my brain... So now that I am "off" and before I head away for a few days I thought I would catch up with a few of the issues that had been dominating the media over the past 10 days or so... With the notable exception of the Royal baby... My approach to that is best summed up in Andrea Mann's piece in the Huffington Post "BREAKING NEWS: Woman Gives Birth To Baby" . I began yesterday by offering some of my thoughts prompted by  Justin Welby's approach to the whole Wonga-world episode . But one of the things I didn't say was that what impressed me most about his approach was that it wasn't just ab...

For a few months there has been a story bubbling away concerning Papisse Cisse the Senegalese striker who was refusing to wear his club Newcastle's strip with the name of its sponsor Wonga emblazoned on it because of his Muslim beliefs, which strictly forbid the charging of interest. Not all Muslims take such a strict approach, and indeed Cisse's Muslim team-mates Cheick Tiote, Moussa Sissoko, Massaido Haidara and Hatem Ben Arfa didn't seem to have a problem with wearing the shirt (although early reports did suggest that Tiote had some reservations ). Cisse received a lot of unsavoury abuse for his stand ... although many suggested that it was more to do with engineering a lucrative transfer away from Tyneside than any religious scruples. This seemed even more the case when photographs appeared of Cisse gambling in a casino (also against strict Islamic law), and in the wake of the exposure of such seeming hypocrisy, it was predictable that he came to an agreement with Ne...

Managed to turn up for my live radio slot on Downtown yesterday morning without my pre-prepared "Review of the Week"... Ooops... so I had to quickly write it from memory... and given that this was at 7am, even with an extra hour in bed it was a miracle that I wrote anything vaguely coherent... Here is an amalgam of the pre-prepared script and my improvised one... Should we show tolerance to the intolerant? Should we afford the full rights of a democratic society to a party, which, if they gained power even for a nanosecond, would completely overturn that democracy, in the same way that the Nazi Party did in Germany in the 1930s? Were the BBC influenced by their respect for the 1,000,000 people who voted for the BNP in the recent European elections, or by the thought of the extra 4,000,000 viewers they were likely to get for Question Time by stirring up a media storm around it? And did Nick Griffin's subsequent appearance reveal him to be the "squalid racist...

Have you ever opened your mouth and said something only to think afterwards “I wish I hadn’t said that!” I do it all the time… Well this week I wonder whether Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury , had a similar feeling after the British media whipped up a storm in the wake of him suggesting that it was inevitable that some aspects of Muslim Sharia law would be incorporated into British law… As it was reported you would think that he had suggested the stoning of rape victims and the cutting off of thieves’ hands… (and given that many of the papers criticising him would suggest that such punishments would be going easy on thieves, I don't know what their problem is!) What he was actually advocating, was the recognition of the legal standing of some of the Sharia councils already active across Britain, operating, not in the field of criminal, but civil and family law, including the power to marry and divorce. He suggested giving these councils legal recognition in exchange fo...