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Temporary hiatus

My landlady has decided to have a new bathroom installed, which means six days of builders in the house. As if the constant noise of drilling and banging (and swearing) wasn't enough, we have no water, electricity (well we do for the moment, but won't tomorrow), or even a toilet. I had to walk ten minutes to ASDA to use their toilet this morning and suffice to say the whole building situation is not exactly conducive to studying. This being the case I'm moving out for a few days so that I can, well, just have a toilet and running water really. The downside of this is that I'll have no internet access until Sunday so there'll be no blogging or e-mail until then :(

The New Fundamentalists

Whoops. Did I say that The New Fundamentalists was on last night at 9pm? Well it wasn't. It was on at 8pm instead which meant that I missed the first half hour of the show which (so I understand) looked at campaigns to get teenagers to commit themselves to celibacy amongst other things.

The part of the programme I did see looked at the rise of faith schools in the state education system but to be honest the whole thing made me want to put two pencils up my nose and headbutt my desk. The show focussed on a new state school in Doncaster which was partly set up with private money from a Christian millionaire. So far, so good, educational standards have risen and exam results have improved. The controversial issue however is the teaching of creation science on the school science curriculum, despite warnings from OFSTED (the schools' inspectorate) that they were breaking the bounds of the science curriculum if they did so.

I braced myself for what was sure to come next, and Channel 4 didn't disappoint. The show's presenter and self-described liberal Anglican Rod Liddle confronted the 'fundamentalist' headmaster of one of the schools involved and challenged him why he was allowing 6-day creationism to be taught in schools. If you ever wanted to see clearly why modernism can be deeply unhealthy for Christianity, then this was it in a microcosm. On the one hand we have liberal rationalist Liddle dragging out the clichés about 'narrow-minded superstition' being 'imposed' on the poor young innocents of Doncaster while on the other hand there was the conservative evangelical headmaster defending six-day creation science on the other before finally resorting to the most irritating and pointless mantra in the whole of Christianity: "I just believe the Bible."

DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH.

I can't remember what happened after that, though it was pretty much the end of the show. To be honest the whole thing just irritated me on both fronts. Firstly was the incredible bias of the main presenter Rod Liddle who it seemed had already made up his modernist mind about primitive and superstitious Christianity and didn't really give it the time of day, but this was topped only by the attitude of the Christians themselves. They didn't really benefit from the editing, that's for sure, but I just get so incredibly frustrated by the way that six-day creation science is presented as the very founding doctrine of Christianity, and that to give in to the evils of science is to deny Christ himself. I'll post more on it soon, but I sincerely believe that the 'debate' between six-day creationism and science is perhaps the biggest waste of time in the entire history of Christianity.

For a more rational review of the show, consult the Wisdom of Tigger.

TV to watch

I'm full of cold and pestilence so I won't get much blogging done for a few days, but there's an interesting looking programme on Channel 4 tonight that I wanted to mention. It's called The New Fundamentalists and will look at the rise of fundamentalist Christianity here in the UK. From the looks of the preview though, it looks like the programme makers are using the term 'fundamentalist' in a rather broad sense and not distinguishing it from 'evangelical', but terminology aside it looks like it will be an interesting programme.

Channel 4 makes some good religious programmes (N T Wright on the Resurrection in 2004 and Mark Dowd on God and the Tsunami in 2005 were outstanding) but I think I'm likely to get irritated by this show on account of both the fundamentalists and the hand-wringing by Channel 4 over the fact that these people aren't nice and tolerant Guardian-reading liberals like they jolly well ought to be. Should be worth watching though.

 It's on tonight at 9pm on Channel 4.