The Old Eighteen

“Britain has had it with religion”

If only the people in this country were as rational as those in the UK:

A poll by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation uncovered a widespread belief that faith - not just in its extreme form - was intolerant, irrational and used to justify persecution.

Pollsters asked 3,500 people what they considered to be the worst blights on modern society, updating a list drawn up by Rowntree, a Quaker, 104 years ago.

The responses may well have dismayed him. The researchers found that the "dominant opinion" was that religion was a "social evil".

Many participants said religion divided society, fuelled intolerance and spawned "irrational" educational and other policies.

One said: "Faith in supernatural phenomena inspires hatred and prejudice throughout the world, and is commonly used as justification for persecution of women, gays and people who do not have faith."

Many respondents called for state funding of church schools to be ended.

Meanwhile, here in the US, we have people calling for creationism to be taught as legitimate science in our classrooms.  Rather than improving our public schools, we're told that the answer to this country's lagging student achievement in math and science is to give parents voucher checks, so they can send their children to private parochial schools where they can be taught that the universe was created over a six-day period less than 10,000 years ago.  Public funding is routinely given to religious organizations so that they can proselytize under the guise of charity.  And merely suggesting that we remove the words "under god" from the pledge of allegiance, or "In god we trust" from our currency, sends politicians and their constituents into fits of rage.

Religion is indeed a social evil, and it's good to see that it's being recognized as such at least somewhere on the planet.

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(via Andrew Sullivan)

Minority Report, coming soon to a government near you

It seems that whenever I get to feeling really down about how bad things have gotten here in America under the current president, something happens over in Europe that reminds me that things could be worse:

The director of Scotland Yard's forensics division says that Britain should be collecting DNA samples from any primary school children who show signs of behavior that exhibit a propensity for later crimes, according to an article in the Observer.

The Yard's Gary Pugh says the idea that trivial offenses committed early in life can forecast more serious crimes later in life is supported by studies, and that identifying these individuals when they're children would not only aid crime-solving later, but possibly deter some of these suspects from committing crimes when they're adults.

Don't know about you, but that sounds pretty damned Orwellian to me - especially given that "any primary school children who show signs of behavior that exhibit a propensity for later crimes" pretty much amounts to "any primary school children with DNA to be collected." The potential for abuse here is obvious and significant.

Goerge Bush has done a pretty good job of giving our civil liberties the once-over here in America, but as bad as it is here, the UK has abused the rights of its citizens even worse in the aftermath of 9/11 and their own brushes with radical Islamic terrorism.  The British have turned their country into a virtual surveillance state with cameras on every street corner, and instituting a program like the one being proposed here would be another step towards remaking the country into something out of V for Vendetta.  Even without this program in place, The UK has already amassed an unprecedented amount of genetic data about its citizens:

The U.K. has the largest DNA database of any country, with samples from 5.2 percent of the country's population, according to Britain's Home Office. The Observer parses that figure to 4.5 million genetic samples.

Currently, the country collects samples only from crime scenes and from anyone over the age of 10 who is arrested for a recordable offense and detained in police custody, whether or not they are ever charged for the offense. It's estimated that a year from now the DNA database will hold about 1.5 million genetic samples taken from youths between the ages of 10 and 18.

And Gary Pugh isn't the only high-ranking Briton with a DNA fetish:

Last year a UK judge said he believed the country should be taking DNA samples from the entire UK population and every visitor who enters its borders because otherwise a disproportionate number of people currently in the database are ethnic minorities, creating defacto racial profiling. He also said that taking samples only from people already arrested for crimes means that authorities miss the chance to solve other crimes committed by people who have never been arrested and have no DNA sample in the database.

Truly disturbing.

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(via Andrew Sullivan)