I’m about as secular a former vicar and heterodox a Christian as you can get, but there are times when the secularists just make themselves look silly. Yesterday’s crazy judgment against Bideford Council is one such instance.
I mean, how uptight and sanctimonious do you have to be to want to prevent other people from starting the council meeting with prayers just because you’re a humanist?
Yes, if the majority of members want to abolish prayers, then fine, do away with them. And, yes, make it clear that attendance at prayers is not compulsory or even especially desirable. But this distinction between whether the prayers are said before the summoned meeting or as part of it is false.
Sounds sensible. The judgment shows that the “loony left” is alive and well in Britain.
Off topic, but literary mention of the town of Bideford:
[blockquote] “…So Lord Howard passed away with five ships of war that day,
Till he melted like a cloud in the silent summer heaven;
But Sir Richard bore in hand all his sick men from the land
Very carefully and slow,
Men of Bideford in Devon,
And we laid them on the ballast down below;
For we brought them all aboard,
And they blest him in their pain, that they were not left to Spain,
To the thumbscrew and the stake, for the glory of the Lord….”
[Alfred, Lord Tennyson “The Revenge: A ballad of the fleet” [/blockquote]
I fully understand why we get these kinds of decisions in a government based on a religiously-neutral Constitution in the United States. I would have thought, however, that a country with an established Church, for all the issues that that must create in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious population, would at least have the luxury of prayers by public officials at public functions.