The Emmanuel Foundation are lying to us

To teach children that they are developed mutations who evolved from something akin to a monkey as a result of a cataclysmic chemical accident and that death is the end of everything is hardly going to engender within them a sense of purpose, self-worth and respect. To present, however, the Truth that they were made by a loving and just God who sees every one of them as being of equal and real value and capable of achieving their best, and to speak of the life beyond death, creates an altogether more positive sense of responsibility, accountability and direction. Surely this is no surprise to anyone?

So you won’t teach them the facts then? It’s all cuddly, nice and beautifully simple but the argument is fatally flawed not only because it doesn’t hold up to even cursory examination, but also because it has no scientific merit whatsoever. You don’t want the truth, Mr McQuoid, because you can’t handle the truth. You just want to duck behind a book that has no more in common with fact than Dan Brown’s quasi-religious potboiler, The DaVinci code.

We await with interest the developments surrounding the current debate on corporal punishment in the belief that, properly regulated and administered, it has the support of a large majority of parents.

Not in a million years if you’re dishing it out, mate! What precisely do you define as properly regulated? Your Bible says this on the issue:

"He who spareth the rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him correcteth him betimes" - Proverbs 13:24

and

"Withhold not correction from a child: for if thou strike him with the rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and deliver his soul from hell." - Proverbs 23:13-14

I rather doubt many parents, and in particular parents of troubled children, will give anyone with a Christian/Biblical ethos a stick to beat their children with. In point of fact, when I went to school and corporal punishment was available, it was frequently seen as a “right of passage” for the tough kids; far from being a deterrent it was actually something to command respect.

We refute the insidious links drawn between poverty and crime, between unemployment and anti-social behaviour. Far more real are the evidences that link the rise in criminal and anti-social activity with the demise in Christian social responsibility, the increasingly easy access to soft pornography and the rocketing rises in abortion and divorce rates.

Unemployment is a problem that faith simply can’t solve. It’s no good praying to some deity to give you a job – that simply isn’t going to happen! Clearly though, Nigel McQuoid owes his very position to his unswerving belief in Christian dogma. This demise of Christian values is mere snake oil; the most violent and repressive times in our recent past have been the very times that Christians were at their most powerful.

The 17th Century civil war complete with Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder General; the Spanish Inquisition 1478-1834 and the English witch hunts c. 1400-1800 are three examples. More recently, a nasty little sociopath called Adolf Hitler rounded up and murdered Jews and other minorities by the million.

Hitler’s absolute hatred for the Jews is widely considered an extrapolation of the ideas infused into him by the Catholic Priests who taught him, and the Protestants who moulded him. Hitler himself alludes to this in Mein Kampf:

How many of my basic principles were upset by this change in my attitude toward the Christian Social movement! My views with regard to anti-Semitism thus succumbed to the passage of time, and this was my greatest transformation of all. - Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf.

Countless unbelievers (read, non-Christians) have lost their lives through what ranks amongst the most violent and inhumane methods ever devised by man. (That’s not to say that many Christians have died for what they believe in – just that they cannot claim exclusivity in this respect.)

The assertion that faith, marriage and traditional family values are a biblical idea is just smoke and mirrors. Humans are social animals, hunter-gatherers in fact who have benefited from living in communal, family and tribal groups for millennia. We may no longer hunt (in the developed world) but we still live in massive tribal groups - only now we call them towns and cities. Stealing that idea and claiming it as your own is typical of religious plagiarism. Even some of the regalia have been borrowed from alternative theologies; the white dress worn by brides as a symbol of virtue and virginity has a distinct Pagan ancestry.