Brights News Feed

Abdullah Gul has been elected to the Turkish presidency by parliament today.

His candidacy provoked military threats and mass secular protest back in April. He has said that he will not contravene the country’s secular constitution, and he has won kudos in Europe during negotiations for Turkey’s EU membership, but secular opposition and many secularist campaigners remain unconvinced that the new President Gul will not use his powers of veto in the direction of an Islamist agenda.

Only time will tell…

(See Guardian, Al Jazeera.)

With one eye on trigger-happy western nations, a Lebanese group of intellectuals have questioned the uniquely confessionalist Lebanese political system — in which power is proportionally distributed amongst representatives of different religious groups — in favor of a secular, humanist code.

The Lebanese Daily Star carries the following (via).
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Numerous liberal bloggers quickly spread the word about the American Family Association’s transparently biased anti-gay internet poll over the last few days. The AFA clearly expected the poll — asking whether consumers will shun businesses which adhere to what the AFA called the “homosexual agenda” — to be filled out mainly by their own supporters.

But the traffic the AFA site actually received, thanks to the bloggers’ ad hoc democratic publicity, clearly turned the results they expected around. Having at first seemingly faked the results of their homophobic poll the American Family Association now appears to have pulled the page altogether.

For the present, however, you can still see the ridiculous survey in the Google cache.

You can even still see the fixed results in the Google cache (these exact same fixed results, as opposed to the real data, were being displayed to everyone who filled out the survey once the wave of bloggers’ traffic skewed the results in the opposite direction from the skew that they had wanted).

It’s worth pointing out that completion of the poll also submitted users’ details to a mailing list. Not only is this a further indication that the AFA had by and large expected only anti-gay responses from their own sympathizers, it also means that many liberal bloggers are now being emailed their rhetorical diatribes and details of the AFA’s anti-gay activist plans. So presumably the liberal blogosphere will now be able to keep an even closer eye on them.

(Also see: GoodAsYou.org)

The automatic rights of a certain number of Anglican bishops to sit in the British House of Lords was seriously undermined last week, by comments from the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, which displayed a dazzling lack of human insight. His speech is proudly displayed on the Diocese website. How do we know that, deep down, everyone is religious? This is how:

Twenty-seven years ago I was chaplain to a young offenders remand centre, Latchmere House. Every inmate was asked to declare his religious affiliation, and four young men were registered as having no religion. One Sunday, all the inmates were offered the chance to go to worship.

The four young men with no religion declined the offer, while their fellow inmates on the A wing took up the offer. The prison officer, not wanting the four men to remain locked up in their cells, asked them to clean the toilets on the wing. The following Sunday, our four non-religious young men took up the offer to go to worship. The prison officer was puzzled why they had opted in this week. “Why are you going to chapel?” he asked. The four replied, “Sir, we didn’t like the ‘No Religion’ place of worship”. Crudely as they put it, those four young men were saying in their naivety that we are all essentially religious.

So, not only does the bishop fail to understand why someone would rather sit in a quiet room than scrub a prison bog, but he passes without remark the notion that non-religious inmates should be given undesirable chores. Indeed, it sounds as if he did not object in any way to this policy at the time.

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United States’ presidential candidate for the Democrats, Barack Obama, today played down the role of religion in the electorate’s voting choices, while admitting that voters were interested in his religion as well as his race, and he saw fit to stress the role of religion in his own life.

“If your name is Barack Hussein Obama, you can expect it, some of that [interest in his religion]. I think the majority of voters know that I’m a member of the United Church of Christ, and that I take my faith seriously,” Obama said in an interview with The Associated Press.

“Ultimately what I think voters will be looking for is not so much a litmus test on faith as an assurance that a candidate has a value system and that is appreciative of the role that religious faith can play in helping shape people’s lives,” he said.

Obama attended a Muslim school in Indonesia from age 6 to 10. He now attends a Chicago church with his family. Also up for possible presidential election are Republican Mitt Romney, a Mormon, and Senator Sam Brownback, R-Kan., an evangelical Christian Catholic convert. Reputedly, there are no atheist Senators in America.

(See Forbes (AP). Also see Slate’s Obama Messiah Watch Part 1 and Part 2.)

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