In the new work, The Grand Design, Professor Stephen Hawking argues that the Big Bang, rather than occurring following the intervention of a divine being, was inevitable due to the law of gravity.

In his 1988 book, A Brief History of Time, Hawking had seemed to accept the role of God in the creation of the universe. But in the new text, co-written with American physicist Leonard Mlodinow, he said new theories showed a creator is “not necessary”.

The Grand Design, an extract of which appears in the Times today, sets out to contest Sir Isaac Newton’s belief that the universe must have been designed by God as it could not have been created out of chaos.

“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing,” he writes. “Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.

“It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”

Poor poor creationists. They spend all their time bitching, moaning and whinging about the impossibility of the universe creating itself without a sentient, guiding hand (whilst ignoring where that came from), but Prof Hawking has undermined them quite comprehensively. There’s just no need for a God to explain anything in existence at all. I wonder how many imaginative ways the creationist lobby can a) dismiss his argument without addressing it b) invoke a theist, straw man argument to try to shift the burden of proof away from them yet again and c) lie about science until they’re blue in the face in the hope most people will believe them and not Hawking.

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Ignore the plot holes a mile wide, the performances (especially Lundgren’s) which should never have been allowed on a small screen, let alone a large one, the absence of character development and ridiculous motivations. It’s a back-to-basics actioner, more fun than most people would care to admit, and even though Sly looks far too tired (acting as well as directing seems to have worn him out), he’s managed to deliver a perfectly good no brainer in a summer largely filled with pretentious garbage. Oh and The Governator is back, accompanied by the best line in the film too…

6/10

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Our society is at risk of being reshaped in ways that will devastate the proud legacy of liberalism. We see a free market philosophy being applied to our schools, wasteful top-down reorganisation of our NHS, and the undermining of our green credentials with cuts to investment.

At some point you have to conclude that this is not a mistake here or there, but part of a pattern. The pattern is of a leadership that has sold out and betrayed your traditions, including that of your recent leadership: Steel, Ashdown, Kennedy and Campbell.

Oh dear. Miliband attacks the ConDem government for precisely the neoliberal, free market policies which he freely associated himself with in the New Labour government, and which, if he became party leader, he too would espouse. Where does he think faith schools came from? Where does he think foundation hospitals came from? And it’s rather ironic to see the man responsible for the Vestas fiasco in the Isle of Wight complaining about a government not standing up for investment in green industries. The truth is that all three major parties are equally in support of neoliberal economic policies now as they ever were – would Miliband really say he didn’t care about the housing market? Would Clegg on his own suddenly confess he was against increases in consumer spending, funded by easy credit? It’s appalling for him to suggest to Lib Dem voters that their interests would be best suited by joining a Labour Party helmed by him. But he goes on:

We are proud of our record in government, from the children lifted out of poverty to the transformation of our NHS, but I believe I am winning the argument that we must turn the page on New Labour and the mistakes it led us to. For example, the argument is being won that a graduate tax based on income would be fairer than tuition fees and a market in higher education. The argument is being won that on issues like ID cards and stop-and-search we became too casual about the liberties of individuals. And I believe the argument is being conclusively won that we must recognise the profound mistake of the Iraq war.

Erm what? This was the party which was supremely indifferent to people becoming super rich, so whilst children were lifted out of poverty, the gap between them and the newly super-rich grew unlike any other time before in British history. The government did nothing whatsoever to tackle the problems of tax avoidance and evasion, was at the very least complicit in the American programme of extraordinary rendition and contracted out torture, thought it right to be able to detain people without charge for forty two days, and made up the reasons for the Iraq War. Is that really a record to be proud of? He isn’t even saying sorry for the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis killed in a war without legality or purpose! He and his party continue to believe in the state curing all problems, and came to believe themselves the ultimate arbiters of risk for everyone. So in order to save everyone from risks which could never be substantiated, they felt they had to subjugate the rights of everyone. Anyone remember the Independent Safeguarding Authority? How liberal is it really to suggest that everyone be considered a paedophile in the workplace unless they can prove otherwise?

Miliband hasn’t argued for an improvement in the voting system. He hasn’t articulated any ideas about how better people could be attracted to the political classes, nor how to devolve power away from the Whitehall mandarins who thought arresting the (then) Shadow Immigration Minister was a good idea. Someone more liberal would suggest no longer destituting asylum seekers, or allowing the police to construct a vast, unaccountable database of protesters. It’s an appeal of the vilest cynicism, promising just as little substantial reform from the nightmare of New Labour as his brother. If Miliband wants Labour to become the home of progressive politics he needs to realign his party fundamentally, not just try to steal other parties’ votes, and certainly not preach about other parties betraying their traditions.

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I like Phillip Noyce, but the last good film he made was over a decade ago. I like Angelina Jolie but she’s only had one good film under her belt across her entire career. ‘Salt’ doesn’t change the game for either of them. It’s an overlong, under-written affair, punctuated by lame performances from actors who should know better and plots that were old twenty years ago, which insult the audience’s intelligence from the outset.

Jolie plays Evelyn Salt, a CIA agent with a murky past, who works alongside fellow agents Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor (who demeans himself by even appearing in this wreck). One day out of the blue they’re confronted by a Russian defector (erm didn’t that end a decade or two ago?), who insists Salt is a sleeper agent, who is planning on killing the Russian president. Ejiofor expresses alarm, but despite being in a top security facility the defector manages to escape with ease, as does Jolie. Rather than clearing the matter up, she goes on the run, showing she’s exactly what he says she is, but claims to be hunting her kidnapped husband, who appears to have a secret significance for her (and then doesn’t). She appears to succeed in her preposterous ambition, but of course it’s all smoke and mirrors to get to the heart of the deeper conspiracy and prevent the assassination of the American president and the triggering of the Third World War. And guess who’s behind it? Well who’s the remaining A/B-list star from the credits not accounted for?

It’s predictable hocum, playing fast and loose with the audience’s understanding of geopolitics – why is the American president prepared to launch a nuclear attack on Russia when the plot is repeatedly acknowledged as a defunct Soviet one, masterminded by independent terrorists? It’s also pretty clear that the underlying sleeper agents plot, ready to destroy American society from within, is an analogy for 9/11-style radical Islamists, but the producers were no doubt too fearful of the reaction they’d get to go with their original plot. It’s ultimately a film for young teenagers and Jolie’s most die-hard fanbase, nothing more. ‘Mr & Mrs Smith’ was also poorly written, but at least it had some charm, which this does not. Kurt Wimmer’s script had originally been offered to Tom Cruise (and you can see why, as well as why he turned it down), and it clearly aims for a sequel as Salt runs into an oh-so ‘Fugitive’-esque future, promising Ejiofor, who suddenly accepts her account of her final battle with Schreiber (you guessed right) with no evidence whatsoever, that she’ll take all the remaining sleeper agents out herself. She needn’t rush.

Noyce wastes the first half hour with one interminable chase after another, and it’s all really tedious and annoying. ‘The Sum of All Fears’ covered similar ground nearly a decade ago, and with much more credibility. Jolie panics over the welfare of her husband, but not so much that she doesn’t (seem to) fulfil her programming before looking for him, and then lets the plotters murder him in front of her face. All the Secret Service bodyguards in the world can’t keep the president safe in the White House bunker. The American nuclear launch protocols are remarkably easy to manipulate. The Russian president pops up quite alive days later, even though he would have been autopsied by then. Ugh ugh ugh. To be fair it improves after the initial, never-ending (and well choreographed) chase, but the plot is silly, the dialogue cringe-worthy and the film fails lamentably to stand out in a summer crammed full of (mostly) awful blockbuster attempts. I’m prepared to accept Jolie as an action lead, but she needs to get a much better script first. Noyce in turn needs to stop trading on past glories.

4/10

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Millions are hopping mad over the news that a bunch of triumphalist Muslim extremists are about to build a “victory mosque” slap bang in the middle of Ground Zero.

The planned “ultra-mosque” will be a staggering 5,600ft tall – more than five times higher than the tallest building on Earth – and will be capped with an immense dome of highly-polished solid gold, carefully positioned to bounce sunlight directly toward the pavement, where it will blind pedestrians and fry small dogs. The main structure will be delimited by 600 minarets, each shaped like an upraised middle finger, and housing a powerful amplifier: when synchronised, their combined sonic might will be capable of relaying the muezzin’s call to prayer at such deafening volume, it will be clearly audible in the Afghan mountains, where thousands of terrorists are poised to celebrate by running around with scarves over their faces, firing AK-47s into the sky and yelling whatever the foreign word for “victory” is.

It seems as though freedom of religion in America for right wingers is contingent on being…well…Christian and right-wing. Brooker quite rightly points out the absurdity of this controversy, especially given that

Cordoba House, as it’s known, is a proposed Islamic cultural centre, which, in addition to a prayer room, will include a basketball court, restaurant, and swimming pool. Its aim is to improve inter-faith relations. It’ll probably also have comfy chairs and people who smile at you when you walk in, the monsters.

To get to the Cordoba Centre from Ground Zero, you’d have to walk in the opposite direction for two blocks, before turning a corner and walking a bit more. The journey should take roughly two minutes, or possibly slightly longer if you’re heading an angry mob who can’t hear your directions over the sound of their own enraged bellowing.

New York being a densely populated city, there are lots of other buildings and businesses within two blocks of Ground Zero, including a McDonald’s and a Burger King, neither of which has yet been accused of serving milkshakes and fries on hallowed ground. Regardless, for the opponents of Cordoba House, two blocks is too close, period. Frustratingly, they haven’t produced a map pinpointing precisely how close is OK.

Seriously what is this ‘hallowed ground’ garbage? Guess what Americans, we had four suicide bombings but we just got to grips with it and got on with our lives. You however are still doing this:

Yes it IS scary that there are people out there who are prepared to commit mass murder, and take themselves out doing so. But resorting to intolerance, lynch mobs and turning your backs on every principle on which your country is based is an act of incalculable stupidity. Nearly 3,000 people died nearly ten years ago, many at the site of the former World Trade Center, but to call that site ‘hallowed ground’ (which by extension covers the entire neighbourhood or any other radius taking people’s fancy really) is extraordinarily dangerous, not to mention specious, for the reasons Brooker gives earlier. Bush may be gone, but the people who gave him license to do what he did haven’t gone away. They’re not PNAC, nor any other special interest group – they’re just average, ‘God-fearing’ Americans.

And they need to get a grip.

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Science is essentially mankind’s best effort at understanding the workings of the known universe, given our limited resources and intelligence. Learning about science is fun, fantastic and thought-provoking, especially discussions arising around ethical grey areas. However, it is important that children are made aware of the limitations of scientific endeavour lest they be corralled into a realm wherein nothing is worth knowing unless it has been determined by empirical scientific discovery.

If they were encouraged towards that worldview alone, I believe they would be receiving an education devoid of further enrichment from a faith-based narrative. I’m not in the business of wanting young people bereft of the entire canon of human belief systems. That religions have stood the test of time is testament to the human need for something other than that which we can prove or disprove.

As a teacher, I’d be doing my pupils a grave disservice if I insisted that the answers that science can give us should be the limit of our understanding of the world. Kids are bright and don’t need liberating from religion, especially if the alternative is limited to giving credence to atheistic secularism alone. Rather, equip them with all the alternatives and let them work it out for themselves.

I’m aghast at this. She’s debating her confrontation with Dawkins about evolution, which she as a science teacher disputed. I’ll accept (to a point) that history has shown at the very least a predilection for something other than what we can prove or disprove, but that has almost entirely been due to historical ignorance – we haven’t been able to figure out the answers about who we are and how we came to be. Now we can, and for her to say that metaphysics should or could in any way answer how humanity, the earth or the universe came to be is objectively wrong. By all means discuss the issues and run through the debates in a religious education class, but science alone does have the answers to these questions – to suggest there are religious/metaphysical/transcendental alternatives is in small or large measure an attempt to indoctrinate children (as Dawkins says) into believing ‘God’ has answers science doesn’t, thereby contributing to robbing them of the freedom to engage with the world critically.

I personally agree with Dawkins that children do need liberating from religion, at least from their parents’. But my bottom line from Erfana Bora’s argument is this: she is doing her pupils a horrible disservice by suggesting as a science teacher that science doesn’t provide all the answers to our understanding of the world – it does. If she disagrees with the theory of evolution, and suggests for a heartbeat that a religious text has any role in any way in explaining how life on earth has come to be, she shouldn’t be teaching science in a school funded by the British taxpayer. Very simple.

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(cross-posted from The Guardian)

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A Roman Catholic adoption charity’s appeal to be allowed to discriminate against gay people wanting it to place children with them has been rejected.

Catholic Care wanted exemption from new anti-discrimination laws so it could limit services provided to homosexual couples on religious grounds.

The Charity Commission said gay people were suitable parents and religious views did not justify discrimination.

The Leeds-based charity said it was “very disappointed”.

Catholic Care – which had been placing children with adoptive parents for more than 100 years – was among a dozen Catholic agencies in England and Wales forced to change their policy towards homosexual people by the equality laws passed in 2007.

I’m sure it was very disappointed – it believed, as the article goes on to say, that the Equality Act went against the Catholic Church’s teachings on marriage and family life. Too bad. Gay people are suitable parents, and belief in the supernatural cannot in this day and age be allowed to justify discrimination against us. No doubt the agency and the church will complain that there are all sorts of disorders we are guilty of, that ‘forcing’ children to be parented by gay people goes against their ‘rights’ to have heterosexual parenting. My argument is that children have the right to good parenting – if the best available happen to be gay in this instance then so be it. The Pope however disagrees:

In a strongly worded letter to the Catholic bishops of England and Wales, the pope criticised the then-Labour government for creating “limitations on the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefs”.

He wrote: “The effect of some of the legislation designed to achieve this goal has been to impose unjust limitations on the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefs. In some respects it actually violates the natural law upon which the equality of all human beings is grounded and by which it is guaranteed.”

Suggesting that discriminating against gay people on the grounds of belief is somehow justifiable under ‘natural law’ is wrong-minded and a misrepresentation of what equality law is supposed to be about, and Ratzinger was quite rightly roundly condemned for his intervention. It’s a relief that the Charity Commission has decided to rest its decision on the rule of civil, rather than ‘God”s law.

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The churches are making a huge comeback in their influence and power over our lives – and they are doing so with the complicity and encouragement of our politicians. It started with the Blair government’s instant acceptance of the Church of England’s 2001 plans to open more schools (and use them to secure the church’s future rather than see them primarily as a public service).

Of course he has a point – our politicians have, in the post-ideological era, decided that there’s advantage to be had in courting the vote of the religiously zealous. In the age where identity politics are everything and where belief has misguidedly been given legislative protection under the banner of ‘equality’, they think pandering to pre-Enlightenment attitudes will gain them easy power. They may be right, but why, when Pollock suggests this appeal shouldn’t fall on fertile ground, does it?

I think Frank Swain identified much of the answer in his excellent talk for the Westminster Skeptics a few weeks ago. We’re not just in an age of identity politics, we’re in an age where we have innumerable claims to the truth coupled to a delivery device unheard of in history. It’s no surprise that the Internet has allowed Islamists to spread their myths with alarming ease – with such an effective bully pulpit (the ‘net is hardly the Enlightening force many had hoped – in large measure the converted continuously preach only to the converted) their Christian counterparts have even decided to speak like us. We say the earth is 4.5 billion years old, and we know it from carbon dating. They say carbon dating methods are unreliable and the earth is only 6000 years old. Emboldened by stealing our clothes they’re on the rise, but surely we live in an age of reason, where education and knowledge are everything?

Watched Big Brother lately? How many people think Raoul Moat was a hero? Who thought Jade Goody was a role model? Being an idiot makes you rich and famous in the blink of an eye. Being a murderer makes you a folk hero. Is it because of the absence of ideology, have scientists failed to make their case to the current generation, or do we just take society’s embracing of Enlightenment values for granted? Are fairy stories just plain more entertaining and comforting than cold, hard emotionless facts? Well I don’t think so. Check Professor Brian Cox and his science/documentary series ‘Wonders of the Solar System’, standing up relentlessly for science and evidence-based policy-making, whilst bringing rockstar-like energy to the subject of cosmology. Prof Cox is fast gaining Dawkins-style reverence, and for all the right reasons; Christianism won’t gain a foothold everywhere.

But we do live in a society now fully marketised, where everything is given a financial value, leading to very clear winners and losers. Should it be any surprise that the economic losers – be they the Joe Cienkowskis of this world or Nigerian migrants – find solace in what makes them feel safe and valued, even if that means denouncing science and reason? We ignore this issue more than any other at our peril if we really care about the direction in which our society’s values are going. It would be easy merely to denounce African churches which label children ‘witches’, or the Vatican for its relentless interference in the lives of the most vulnerable, but those values which allow these backward steps to take place represent a retreat more than anything – people are afraid. The West now lives under a neo-liberal economic consensus, barely questions it and then wonders why segments of the population do everything they can not to take part in that order. The rise of Christianism could easily be undermined if we came up with more believable solutions about how to be a more inclusive society.

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This video is just one attempt by evolutionary scientists to refute creationism and Biblical literalism, but it’s a good one. Enjoy.

“A society that turns its back on reason and prefers ideology is headed towards some kind of theocracy.” – James L Powell, Ph.D.

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The drawn-out battle over gay and lesbian marriage in California has been extended for another week after a federal judge kept same-sex unions on hold to give opponents the chance to appeal to a higher court.

Dozens of gay couples who had spent hours standing outside City Hall in San Francisco hoping to see an immediate resumption of marriages had their hopes dashed, at least until 5pm on 18 August when Judge Vaughn Walker has ordered the ban on the ceremonies to be lifted.

Liberty Counsel however resolutely opposed Judge Walker’s refusal to stay his ruling:

Mathew Staver, Founder of Liberty Counsel and Dean of Liberty University School of Law, commented: “It is outrageous that Judge Walker refused to stay his ruling. This is a classic example of radical individualism and judicial activism. Judge Walker obviously has not learned the lesson of 2008, when the California Supreme Court refused to stay its decision on marriage. That decision was reversed in short order, but it caused a huge disruption. Staying the effect of Judge Walker’s ruling pending the appeal is the only logical thing to do in this case. This case has a high probability of being overturned on appeal. It makes no sense for one person to set aside a state constitutional amendment, radically change the longstanding status quo, and then later be reversed. The disruption will be enormous if this decision is not stayed. In the end, the commonsense and constitutional definition of marriage as one man and one woman will be upheld.”

It’s shocking that an educator in the law should talk with such brazen, discriminatory language, but there you are. And they’re not alone:

“Voters in 30 states have protected marriage in their state constitutions because they understand the importance of a mom and a dad to children.  The social science data is overwhelming and clear – children do best when raised by a mom and dad.   Judge Walker’s opinion completely stepped over these findings by the international research community.”

The Family Research Council has a thing against homosexuality. They have a habit of distorting statistics, lying and blaming gay people for the homophobia they face, but of course they are as adept as all Christianist extremists in doing what we’re all doing on the ‘net – presenting our own truths. We are truly in a postmodern era, where we’re almost destined to suffer an innumerable number of competing ‘truths’ – the Internet is the biggest bully pulpit after all, and the zealous have learned how to take steadfast positions in debates over issues such as homosexuality by playing our game – using facts. It means little to them that they make them up – how many people duped by their ‘facts’ would be likely to do the necessary research to debunk them? But let me address just one here.

It is indeed important to have a mother and a father, but the evidence from children’s own experiences has overwhelmingly shown that children do best when raised by good parents. The gender balance doesn’t determine outcomes for children – that’s far more down to all sorts of other variables like social class. You’ll find the FRC’s ‘international research community’ will be overwhelmingly religiously extreme and homophobic – no big shocker that they should suggest homosexuality is detrimental to good parenting, but of course they also ignore the fact that people don’t get married just to have children. It’s quite amusing for them to want now to uphold Prop 8 to ‘protect children’ when numerous gay marriages will never end up with any, but these people are unable to think for themselves.

It’s a good thing that licences are back being issued to same-sex relationships in California. It’s a better thing that marriages will resume on Wednesday. I hope very much, on the very non-discrimination grounds which Prop 8 was struck back down with, that things stay that way in that overwhelmingly important constituency. Religious zealots need to learn once and for all that just because they have ‘sacred texts’, whether they interpret them properly or not, they don’t have the right to discriminate against people different to them. In the 21st century we’re governed by Enlightenment principles and civil law – the rights of individuals trump ‘God”s law every single bloody time.

I am a gay man, and am married to another man. If you’re a heterosexual Christianist that doesn’t affect you or your marriage in any way whatsoever. Get over it.

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I can do better vlogs than this and hopefully over the next few days you’ll get to see some better efforts. I could have said how infuriating it was to have sequences screenwriter Patrick O’Neill didn’t want to or couldn’t get himself out of explained just by drugging Diaz’s character. I could have mentioned how bizarre it was to have Cruise’s character a government sponsored secret agent, whilst owning a private secret, Thunderbirds-style island in the Azores, or how asinine the genuine bad guy (it was never going to be Cruise) was – almost reduced to twirling his evil Spanish moustache to prove his menace, and even being wrongly overdubbed in Spanish – did director James Mangold think we just wouldn’t notice? What about the oh-so-convenient ending or the bizarre finale? And why bring in Cruise’s screen parents? An unentertaining, poorly thought out mess of a film, which deserves to crash and burn.

3/10

P.S. For those of you who have seen it – was there any attempt whatsoever to explain the ‘day’ in ‘Knight and Day’?

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