{"id":1880,"date":"2009-04-19T09:46:25","date_gmt":"2009-04-19T17:46:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=1880"},"modified":"2009-04-19T09:52:08","modified_gmt":"2009-04-19T17:52:08","slug":"thought-for-the-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/thought-for-the-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Thought for the Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

At one level this <\/a>story from the London Independent<\/em> is good news:<\/p>\n

Religious broadcasting has taken an unexpected turn at the BBC, leaving secularists last night claiming a breakthrough. An important new committee that the corporation will consult on religious broadcasting is to include a humanist.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read on, however, and the story rapidly\u00a0turns for the worse:<\/p>\n

Andrew Copson, director of education and public affairs for the British Humanist Association, has been appointed to the BBC’s Standing Conference on Religion and Belief, a new body which replaces the Central Religious Advisory Committee (Crac), which advised on “religion-related policy and coverage”. Mr Copson suggested his appointment may give him the chance to challenge the long fought over Radio 4 religious slot, Thought for the Day<\/em>. “We need to see an increased contribution from humanists in slots run by the religion and ethics department that are presently confined only to religions,” he said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To explain a little, Thought for the Day<\/em> <\/a>is a two-or-three-minute homily broadcast during the course of BBC Radio 4\u2019s Today, <\/em>a highly influential (and deservedly so) news program broadcast each weekday morning. Once (if my memory is correct, which it may well not be) Thought for the Day<\/em> was mainly confined to the pronouncements of various\u00a0worthies from the Church of England (fair enough;\u00a0the C of E\u00a0is, and should remain, the state religion – and the BBC is<\/em> the state broadcaster) but has since been made much more \u2018inclusive\u2019. Needless to say, this has done nothing to derogate from\u00a0Thought for the Day’s<\/em> overall tone of highminded, usually harmless usually leftist\u00a0flummery – albeit highminded, usually harmless usually leftist\u00a0flummery wrapped in a clerical guise. As such it was something that could be safely disregarded. And was: I seem to recall my father usually switched off\u00a0 Thought for the Day <\/em>when it came on to the car radio in the course of long journeys down to London when I was a small boy. Like the ‘exercise’ segment the BBC used to broadcast even earlier (and which received\u00a0the same paternal switch-off),\u00a0it was a mild irritation he was well able to do without at that time of the morning.<\/p>\n

Allow humanists onto this show, and\u00a0luckless\u00a0listeners will be subjected to yet more\u00a0leftist nonsense (trust me on this)\u00a0made even more nauseating by paeans to the glories of \u2018humankind\u2019, the mysteries of the universe and, worse of all, the sickening prospect that someone somewhere might take it seriously. Leave Thought for the Day<\/em> where it belongs: with the vicars.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s worth adding that BBC religious broadcasting like Thought for the Day<\/em> and the marvelous Songs of<\/em> <\/a>Praise<\/em> (completely unwatchable, but like the Church of England, I like to know that it\u2019s there) is part of the warp and woof of the nation. Tampering with it is not something that a secular right<\/em> should support.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At one level this story from the London Independent is good news: Religious broadcasting has taken an unexpected turn at the BBC, leaving secularists last night claiming a breakthrough. An important new committee that the corporation will consult on religious … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1880"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/64"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1880"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1880\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1882,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1880\/revisions\/1882"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}