One thing that distinguishes humanism from most other world views is that humanists judge situations on their own merits according to standards of reason and humanity and not according to ‘received wisdom’ or their interpretation of some archaic book. This is a basic principle of humanism but, unfortunately, it seems nobody had told the Humanist Society of Scotland (HSS) Board of Trustees this before they sat, early last year, to consider an appeal from one of their members against a decision made by the Society’s celebrant training team. The appeal was upheld.

Earlier this week, that same successful appellant was the subject of a story in a grubby little Scottish tabloid, which the HSS seems keen to promote. That a link to this story appears on the HSS website suggests that the HSS approves of it — and I dare say the story was probably fed to the newspaper by someone on the HSS Board of Trustees. But I reckon the story that appeared in that particularly odious little rag of a newspaper was of virtually zero interest to regular readers and is already wrapping fish suppers.

The story behind the story is a tad more interesting, at least to me. Before I share it, I want to say that I have the utmost respect for the good people in the Humanist Society of Scotland and for the excellent work they do, especially in providing ceremonies. Having some 25 years experience of involvement in charities and other non-profit organisations, I know they are full of unsung heroes who are passionate about what they do and who do it brilliantly.

I also know that charities and voluntary organisations sometimes attract people who are well-meaning but unaware of their own limitations. (Read about the Dunning-Kruger effect here.) In fact, such people have often been successful in other fields of work and think that they can usefully contribute something to the management committees of non-profit organisations. But, all too often, they come heavily laden with the culture and values of whatever sector they built their career in. These are often out-of-kilter with voluntary sector culture and the resulting conflicts can tear small organisations apart unless the people in them can learn from their mistakes and try to rectify them. I believe this is as true of Humanist organisations as it is of any other and I think this story from the HSS is an illustration of it.

(By the way, I think a further, much smaller, category of people attracted to charity membership and volunteer work are entirely self-serving and I guess the subject of the tabloid story — the target of  the HSS Trustees’ wrath — is one of those.)

Here’s the story as told to me by a former HSS member:

The bloke in the newspaper — I’ll call him ‘Noddy’ — is a retired police officer who joined the Humanist Society of Scotland and became a registered celebrant, conducting funerals and weddings. Early last year, his son was convicted of supplying cocaine. This was considered newsworthy by the Scottish press because of Noddy’s high-profile police career and because his son was himself a serving police officer at the time of his illegal activities.

Now it turns out that Noddy has told Funeral Directors that his son — who’d been sentenced to 12 months in prison for the drug offence — is a humanist celebrant. Indeed, he has passed on ceremonies work to his son, even though the latter has not gone through any kind of selection procedure, let alone been trained and approved by the HSS to carry out ceremonies in their name.

Like the British Humanist Association, the Humanist Society of Scotland trains suitable men and women to produce and conduct ceremonies of a high standard. Most celebrants take the work seriously enough to adhere to a code of conduct defining what is acceptable. Funnily enough, that code doesn’t allow for the passing off of one’s ex-convict son as a trained and registered celebrant to Funeral Directors and bereaved families. Presumably this is because it is a betrayal of the trust of the former, cheats the latter of the quality of service they deserve and deprives other celebrants of work they — unlike Noddy’s son — were qualified to do, having each made a personal investment in becoming qualified by paying for and attending the training and having each been assessed as meeting the high standards demanded by the HSS.

According to the newspaper report, Noddy claims he has trained his son much better than the HSS could. I find this hard to believe for reasons that will become apparent.

Celebrant training involves attending a course run by a team of very experienced celebrant trainers. (Indeed, the senior trainer at the time was one of the Society’s most experienced celebrants as well as its most experienced trainer and had worked tirelessly for many years developing the training courses and review scheme for celebrants and establishing high professional standards.) At the end of the course, candidates are required to complete a written assignment — a ceremony script based on a scenario provided by the trainers.

Noddy trained first as an HSS funeral celebrant then, in November 2009, he attended the Society’s training course to conduct humanist weddings. According to a document signed by the four HSS trainers, Noddy’s first attempt at a funeral script was poor and he was given “full and detailed feedback on the areas in the script that did not meet the Funeral Celebrant Standards was given. He was then mentored to raise his standard of work and the second ceremony he presented achieved the required standard.” The same paper describes Noddy as “inattentive” and “disruptive” during the weddings training course; he talked over people and “showed a disregard for his colleagues and the training process.” Of his first attempt at the end of course assignment — a wedding ceremony script — the trainers say they were,

shocked to receive such a poor piece of work from this trainee, particularly given the fact that he had received a great deal of detailed feedback on previous material presented for review, most especially on the ceremony script he submitted for his review to be added to the Funeral Celebrant Register.

So, in addition to his inappropriate demeanour during the training, and in spite of everything he was supposed to have learned with all that extra help from his funeral training, Noddy had produced a terrible wedding script. Indeed, the script he’d produced had such serious flaws that if it were a real marriage ceremony, it would have meant the couple were not legally married! It was the — hardly unreasonable — view of the training team that, as these flaws had since been pointed out to Noddy, he may well be able to produce a script of the required standard now. But the production of a satisfactory script on second attempt and after he’d been told what was wrong with the first one would not, as far as the trainers were concerned, alleviate the many concerns raised overall about his ability and behaviour. The four members of the training team were as one in their opinion that Noddy should not be allowed the opportunity to resubmit his assignment this time. And who, in their right mind, could blame them?

In making this recommendation, we felt that we were acting in the best interests of both the trainee and the HSS as a whole, to ensure the maintenance of the highest professional standards.

That the training team’s recommendation was in the best interest of the HSS is indisputable. That is why it was supported by a majority of the charity’s Ceremonies sub-Committee, who evidently had their heads screwed on properly. All ceremonies are hugely important to the people having them and providers of these ceremonies can’t afford to make serious mistakes. This is particularly true of Humanist marriage ceremonies, which have — thanks to the good will of the Scottish Registrar General — had legal status in Scotland since 2005.

For the good of the HSS, Noddy should have accepted the training team’s decision but instead he complained about it to the charity’s Board of Trustees. I’m told — though I personally find it hard to believe — that Noddy was actually encouraged to do this by a member of that same Board of  Trustees who, as it happened, was another retired police officer. (But I’m not going to go there.)

Now come on, guys! Why would someone entrusted by a charity’s paid-up membership to act in the charity’s best interests, actively encourage someone — even if he is a mate — to challenge a decision that was clearly in the best interests of both the charity and the public it professes to serve? Especially someone who cares so much about the HSS that he’d managed to grab not one but two powerful jobs in the HSS leadership? (Seriously — he was the HSS Secretary and he doubled up as National Ceremonies Co-ordinator. I suspect this is why the HSS are so shy on their website about who they are compared to, say, the BHA. I understand he plays neither role now, however. No idea why.)

Encouraging an obnoxious and incompetent trainee to complain doesn’t make sense does it?

But it gets worse.

The group of four HSS office-bearers tasked with investigating what they called Noddy’s “complaint/appeal”, actually recommended that not only should his request to resubmit be granted but that he be offered mentoring to help him reach the required standard. The Board of Trustees agreed with these recommendations, thereby allowing this disruptive, inattentive, rude individual, whose ceremony script had been so poor it had shocked his trainers, to resubmit the assignment incorporating all the amendments he now knew it needed, thereby getting his name onto the Registrar General’s list of Humanist celebrants who are approved to conduct legal weddings in Scotland.

And they arrived at this decision through a piece of reasoning that a twelve-year-old would be ashamed of.

According to their report, the group “agreed immediately that they did not wish to disagree with the trainers’ evaluation and that there should therefore be no recommendation for approval or otherwise. The single issue facing them was one of fairness, precedent and equity with specific reference to the request to resubmit only.”

WTF???

There was no “issue of fairness, precedent and equity” to be considered here. The HSS isn’t a tribunal or public examination board but a provider of a valued service to the public. The only “issue” was whether or not the candidate was suitable to conduct marriage ceremonies in the name of the HSS. The experienced team entrusted with the task of training and assessing candidates said that he wasn’t and they gave good reasons why he wasn’t. That should have been the end of the matter.

The investigating group, however, thought otherwise. Read this and weep:

“This decision we consider to have been contrary to natural justice, especially in a training situation. We are also aware that in what we consider to have been similar circumstances an earlier candidate was permitted to re-submit work and was subsequently recommended for registration. We do not accept that the differences between the two cases are of sufficient significance to merit such diverse treatment….Our determination is that in denying the candidate an opportunity to resubmit his work after appropriate remediation there is a danger that natural justice might have been denied him, and that humanist principles of fairness, equity, and good practice in this particular regard might have been breached.”

Rational thinkers will instantly spot biggest flaw in this execrable piece of reasoning. For the benefit of any numptyheids, I’ll point it out:

It is the patently ludicrous suggestion that, because an earlier candidate had been allowed to re-submit, Noddy should be allowed to as well. This, evidently, is the ‘precedent’ that the investigating group refer to.

It is normal practice in many training situations to fail no-hopers but to allow candidates who’ve shown promise and whose flaws are considered redeemable in the professional judgement of their trainers, to re-sit. If the earlier candidate’s behaviour and work was as bad as Noddy’s, then he or she shouldn’t have been allowed to resubmit. The fact that he or she was invited to resubmit indicates that, in the professional judgement of the HSS trainers, the earlier candidate wasn’t as bad as Noddy. (The investigating group repeatedly say in their report that they that didn’t assess Noddy’s work and weren’t questioning the evaluation of the trainers.)

So what precedents would be set by the training teams decisions to allow the earlier candidate to resubmit but to refuse Noddy the same opportunity?

That candidates who — unlike Noddy— show promise, should be given a second chance and that candidates — like Noddy — who don’t show promise, shouldn’t.

Anyone see a problem with that? I’m particularly interested in hearing how it breaches “humanist principles of fairness, equity, and good practice”?

In the meantime, let’s consider what precedent has been set as a result of the investigating group’s recommendations and the Trustees decision to endorse them?

That it doesn’t matter how obnoxious a candidate is and how bad their work, they must be virtually spoonfed into passing the course!

Nice one, HSS.

If precedents were as important to humanist principles as the HSS Board of Trustees seemed to think, one wonders how many more hopeless candidates they would have allowed to use up their people’s time and resources, before reason prevailed and they got their priorities right. Fortunately for them, precedents are totally irrelevant and they can ignore the consequences of their stupid reasoning and pretend it never happened (well, apart from the consequences of losing their training team, all of whom resigned in disgust at at the decision and quite right too).

And if they can’t understand why precedents don’t matter, I can do no better than refer them to late Professor Stuart Sutherland’s classic book ‘Irrationality’:

Anyone who has ever sat on a committee will have heard someone say, ‘We can’t do that: it will set a precedent.’ This remark is wholly irrational. The proposed action against which it is directed is either sensible or not. If it is sensible, taking it will set a good precedent; if it is not sensible, the action should not be taken. Whether or not a precedent is set is therefore irrelevant; the decision should be made on its own merits. Moreover, outside courts of law, nobody need be bound by past decisions: the past is finished, it cannot be changed, and its only use is that it may sometimes be possible to learn from it.

I recommend Sutherland’s book to all humanists and — to repeat what I said at the beginning — especially those who aspire to positions of responsibility that affect other people’s lives.

The HSS come out of the Noddy story (as it appears in newspaper) smelling like a rose but they don’t deserve to. Noddy had an unblemished (I presume)  30-year career in the police and who could blame the HSS Trustees for not foreseeing he might pull a stunt like that? Well, anybody who knew the inside story of how Noddy came to feel he could get away with anything, that’s who.

If those who are ultimately responsible for this debacle are seriously committed to humanist principles, they might yet demonstrate this by admitting to those who’ve been hurt the most that the recommendations and decisions made were the wrong ones.

But I’m not holding my breath.

Take Michael White, for example, in yesterday’s Guardian:  “Secularists dominate the airwaves for the other 23 hours and 57 minutes of the day,” he tells us, “so why not keep three minutes for the faiths?” Or as Free Presbyterian Minister, David Robertson, whines in the Sunday Herald, “The BBC’s default world view and operating principle is secularist…We will be more than happy to give up the tiny slot that is reserved for “religion” in the BBC…provided that the 99% of the BBC that is exclusively run from secularist presuppositions is opened to the majority of the population who have some form of religious belief.”

Well, blow me! It never occurred to me that religious listeners might resent the fact that the rest of the BBC output is presented from a neutral perspective and that they’d rather have a religious slant on everything. Perhaps they’d like to hear an archbishop or rabbi present the news from their religious “presuppositions” as well as produce dramas, documentaries and music programmes?

Sorry, but that argument is hogwash. Unless a programme is specifically religious, everyone can enjoy it, regardless of their world view. There is a place for religious thoughts and I don’t mean they should stay in the heads of religious people. I’ve no objection to a few clearly flagged religious programmes. After all, religion is a special interest still held by many and those of us who are bored or offended by it can listen to something else.

The problem with Thought for the Day is that it interrupts a purportedly serious daily news magazine with what is, for many of us, a highly irritating three-minute religious platitude. I always found TFTD objectionable when I was a regular listener to the Today programme. One day in 1981 my irritation boiled over and I switched channels permanently. I’ve never listened to the programme since but recently I’ve looked at some transcripts of contributions to the slot on the programme’s website and I found no improvement to speak of. Most of them are, in my view, trite, tired and unoriginal.

The second problem with Thought for the Day is its very title, which suggests the thought being expressed is profound and meaningful. Excluding non-religious contributers implies that only religious people can have profound, meaningful thoughts. Thus non-religious listeners are irritated even more.

On the plus side, a three-minute daily platitude would seem to be low-hanging fruit, as far as secularists are concerned: the campaign against it gets the secular humanist organisations some publicity during the silly season. If you do nothing else for the campaign against religious privilege, drop a line of complaint or just sign a petition against TFTD’s exclusively religious character and pat yourself on the back for doing something worthy.

I’m inclined to agree with A C Grayling’s view, quoted in The Telegraph:

At the moment the slot is discriminatory. A lot of people are irritated by it being on a main news programme. They should really abolish it but at the very least they should have alternative views.

Yes, they should but personally I wouldn’t lift a finger in furtherance of that particular cause. I loathe TFTD with a passion and I wouldn’t expect to like it any better just because it included an occasional secular platitude. Because, let’s face it, not every secularist is a Grayling or a Baggini. We shouldn’t flatter ourselves that the quality of the slot is necessarily going to be improved by the inclusion of secular contributors. The bar isn’t exactly set high.

Opposing David Robertson in the Sunday Herald, Tim Maguire of the Humanist Society of Scotland, says,

If the UN Special Rapporteur on Religion and Belief is to be believed, two-thirds of the UK population have no religious belief. Why should they look to religious leaders for moral guidance? On the other hand, if the Daily Mail is to be believed, there’s a huge moral vacuum in our society. For once I agree with the Daily Mail, but let’s fill that vacuum with philosophers, thinkers and comedians whose conclusions are reached by reason and compassion rather than divine revelation.

Hang on a minute, where’ve I read that before? Strangely, the same four sentences — identical right down to the use of the first person — appear in a piece written for The Guardian back in February by Juliet Wilson, also of the Humanist Society of Scotland. (And there was I mocking the Muslim speakers Adam Deen and Hamza Andreas Tzortzis, recently, for being unoriginal thinkers with a set script!)

Anyway, Juliet was promoting what she describes as a “secular alternative in podcast form called Thought for the World” and I resisted the temptation to scoff at the idea that a three-minute slot on highbrow radio could impinge on any moral vacuum because my hopes were raised by the mention of philsophers, comedians and thinkers.

Alas, the first of this year’s series of thought for the world podcasts was by Muriel Gray, who is neither philosopher nor comedian nor, it would seem, much of a thinker. Her contribution on voluntary euthanasia, which I railed about in a previous post because it’s a subject close to my heart, was not only devoid of both reason and compassion, it also conflicted sharply with the view held by the majority of freethinkers — and many religious believers too — that people who are suffering unbearably should have the right to end their own life if they choose to. As I said in the earlier post,

To be fair, Muriel wasn’t really trying to make an argument. She was simply using an opportunity handed to her on a plate to speak uninterrupted and unchallenged about what she wants or, rather, what she thinks she would want if she were dying a slow painful death. The arguments in favour of a change of law, the sufferings of the likes of Diane Petty, Nigel Pratten, Sue Lawson or countless others could be safely ignored. And they were.

It struck me as a tad ironic that this project of providing a secular alternative to religious TFTD should give a voice and a potential audience of millions to someone who opposes another long-standing humanist campaign and one that is far more important, in my opinion, than getting secular viewpoints on TFTD because it is a campaign that is concerned with real human suffering.

I wouldn’t deny people the right to say whatever they like; what I object to is giving people a soapbox which, once they’ve had their say, they can kick aside and go home without any requirement that they listen to an opposing view. The notion of providing platforms for platitudes where there is no opportunity to engage with the speaker and explore their ideas in more depth — or disagree with them altogether — doesn’t sit well with my understanding of humanism as a positive and democratic philosophy.

All over the web I see thoughts being expressed by ordinary people with more wit, wisdom and perspicacity than most of the contributors to either TFTD or its secular alternative can manage. Better still, I see those thoughts being challenged and developed through discussion and debate from people all over the world (something that humanists in Scotland don’t seem very interested in, judging by the tumbleweed on their internet forum).

For all the noise that (some) secularists make over our exclusion from TFTD, I know there are plenty who, like me, don’t give a flying toss about it and aren’t really interested in hearing atheists sounding off with no come-back. An attempt to raise funds for the Thought for the World project launched in February this year has raised a pitiful £211.11 so far and, as the extraordinary success of the atheist bus appeal demonstrates, it’s not because we’re stingy.

No. While the idea of pissing off the likes of the Revd. David Robertson is appealing, it wouldn’t compensate for the tedium of hearing atheists use the slot to promote their favourite cause or whinge about their personal bugbears without fear of being challenged.

I’d rather scrap it altogether, thanks all the same.

Edited to add: Oops – if I’d seen this article in the Independent before posting, I would’ve chosen a different title. I recommend the article in spite of the title.

As a result of the meeting I attended — a precious hour and a half of my life that I’ll never get back — I have resolved, firstly, not to bother attending any more CHG meetings that are addressed by religous speakers and, secondly, to join the National Secular Society.

The event was a debate between humanist philosopher, Nigel Warburton and Hamza Andreas Tzortzis who, like his friend Adam Deen,  about whom I have written two posts already, describes himself as an ‘intellectual activist’. And like Adam Deen, it’s hard to imagine anyone less intellectual.

Listening to him speak, it soon dawned on me that of the three following possibilities, one was definitely true:

1. Adam Deen has adopted Andreas Tzortzis as his mentor and copies everything he says and does.
2. Andreas Tzortzis has adopted Adam Deen as his mentor and copies everything he says does.
3. Deen and Tzortzis are both products of some sinister cloning process.

I’m inclined towards the third option. If they are not literally clones, they do appear to have undergone some kind of redaction programme that has cruelly stripped them of whatever critical thinking skills they might have possessed and programmed them to spout the exact same nonsense in the exact same way. As I have already written extensively about Adam Deen, I’m tempted just to point readers to my posts about him with the advice that everything I wrote about Deen applies equally to Tzortzis.

One of the strategies of the How to claim to be a Muslim intellectual activist and keep a straight face! training programme undergone by both Tzortsis and Deen is to quote-mine extensively from just about anyone as long as they sound vaguely important. Tzortzis took this strategy very seriously and rolled out one quote after another in quickfire succession. No doubt many of these quotes were very interesting but, as he rattled them off so quickly, I’ve no idea what any of them were or who said them. This hardly matters because the object of the exercise, of course, is simply to give the impression that the speaker has actually read widely and understands his material. Nobody was fooled (except, perhaps, the small number of Muslims in the audience) and, as someone pointed out, anybody can find quotes to support their point of view but they do not an argument make. I’m sure these speakers are fully aware that a live debate is different from an academic essay and that quotes and statistics are lost on a live audience.

The debate topic on this occasion was, Is Religion A Force For Good Or Evil?. In the merficfully short time he had available, Tzortzis referred to several “fallacious claims against religion” and presented what he presumably thought was a watertight rebuttal of each of them. For example, against the “fallacious claim” that religion is divisive, he argued that “Islam preaches tolerance and compassion”. So the Islamists I had witnessed bullying and harassing people at the Conway Hall the previous evening (see my last post) were not being aggressive thugs, they were being tolerant and compassionate. Their leader, who criticised British society for being “dirty” and had previously defended the murderers who bombed London in July 2005 and blew 52 innocent people to bits is undoubtedly a very tolerant and compassionate man. He just got bad publicity, right?

On the “fallacious claim” that religion causes violence, Tzortzis simply argued that secular ideologies had been the source of more violence. Personally, I’m not aware that anybody  has ever denied the violence perpetrated in pursuit of communism or whatever but  highlighting it does not address the very real issue of people being blown up because they happened to be born in a different culture and were raised worshipping a different version of the sky-daddy or none at all. As the very tolerant and compassionate Anjem Choudary said of the 7/7 bombings:

At the end of the day, when we say “innocent people” we mean “Muslims”. As far as non-Muslims are concerned, they have not accepted Islam. As far as we are concerned, that is a crime against God.

You can’t get much more tolerant or compassionate than that now, can you?

Tzortzis also  helpfully pointed out that there were statistics to show that religious believers were happier and gave more to charity and who can argue with statistics? What he singularly failed to address was the question of all the horrible things done in the name of religion. In fact, he seemed to be in denial about them. When they were raised by Warburton and by members of the audience he dismissed them as “presuppositions”. A question from an audience member asking that if religion is not to blame for the bad things done in its name, how can it take credit for the good things, was also ignored.

As with the Andrew Copson v Adam Deen debate, it was apparent that Warburton and Tzortzis were unable to get on the same page. Warburton had obviously gone anticipating genuine dialogue to take place, Tzortzis had gone there simply to preach. Warburton was later criticised by some humanists there as being far too conciliatory but I don’t particularly agree with this criticism. Warburton talked intelligently and stayed focussed. At the very outset he said he thought the debate topic was a false dichotomy, that there were some benefits and some negative consequences of religion and that not all religions were the same. But he didn’t pull his punches when listing the vile things that religious people do: child abuse, the murder of  Theo Van Gogh, genital mutilation of women, homophobia all got mentioned but Tzortzis simply wasn’t prepared to acknowledge that these have anything to do with religion and as long as religious people try to slither out of facing up to them, there can be no useful dialogue with them.

Certainly nothing useful came of that meeting and feedback from those attending was uniformly negative. A few examples:

Has Tzortsis never heard the famous phrase “Lies, damned lies, and statistics”? Warburton didn’t take the easy ‘religion=evil’ stance, but I felt that his conciliatory approach was lost under the bludgeon of Tzortsis’ simplistic ‘religion=good’ version of Islam….The meeting ended with one member of the audience virtually equating homosexuality and paedophilia and whilst I understand Warburton’s answer that we should debate these ideas rather than rely on dogma, I felt this questioner was let off lightly, and his unpleasant ‘slippery slope logic’ left unquestioned and unchallenged.

The 6 young muslims sat next to me, who seem to have been there at Tzortzis request, appeared to pay no attention to the debate but managed to time their homophobic and ill-informed islamic propoganda statements perfectly to avoid any serious challenge. I can only applaude Nigel Warburton for attempting to answer, and was equal not surprised to notice Tzortzis make no attempt to challenge them. It was disappointing to see someone of Tzortzis apparent distorted views allowed a platform in this group and more so to have allowed the representative of Dialogue with Islam to wander around taking photos until my partner challenged him.

The Muslim speaker preached more than he debated. Guaranteed to make hackles rise, but this was, after all, a dialogue with Islam. We surely weren’t surprised by the dogmatic assertions and claims to objective truth mystically secreted in obscure quotations…

Indeed, I wasn’t surprised that during the discussion period Tzortzis lost the plot, went off-topic and starting parroting the same poppycock about objective morality so beloved by Adam Deen (and the Christian evangelist William Lane Craig, whose exact turns of phrase Deen likes to emulate). The Deen/Tzortzis indoctrination programmme sees the issue of objective morality as a kind of virility test. As I said in another post,

In Adam’s view, if you aren’t prepared to nail your colours to the mast and declare child abuse, say, to be objectively morally wrong, then you are effectively saying that it might be OK in certain circumstances. Therefore, however decent and moral we seem, at heart we are no better than child abusers.

They think that believing in God as a source of objective morality keeps you on the right track, whereas those of us who realise that  morality is a product of human nature and experience will point to the monstrous things done by religionists in the name of their religion as giving the lie to that notion, only to hear religionists deny these things have anything to do with religion. And so we reach deadlock. End of dialogue, such as it was.

Everything Tzortzis said, I could take with a pinch of salt until the point when he started telling us that our views were “inconsistent with an atheist viewpoint”, an accusation he repeated several times evidently without realising quite how ignorant and pompous it made him sound. Just like Adam Deen, Tzortzis is simply not interested in hearing in what humanists think or believe. Their indoctrination programme has told him what the “atheist position” is and what we actually say can be safely disregarded.

In case anyone thinks I’m overplaying the similarities between Tzortzis and Deen, consider this: In my second post on Adam Deen, I said that Deen sneeringly pointed out that, according to atheists, “human beings are just the accidental by-products of an evolutionary process”. Tzortzis said exactly the same thing. He used the same words and the same tone. In that other post I quoted Deen as saying, “when a fighter bomber bombs an entire community and a whole community is killed, all that’s really happened on an atheistic perspective is a realignment of molecules.” Again, Tzortzis said exactly the same thing. Bloody hell, they’ve got a script! Shouldn’t someone whisper to them that to qualify as an intellectual, you actually need to be an original thinker not a mindless moron that parrots empty arguments that a child can refute?

I deeply regret not just walking out the minute Tzortzis decided to start insulting us in this way and the implication that atheists don’t see people as anything more than a block of molecules is about as insulting as anyone can get though Tzortzis is evidently too lacking in human empathy and understanding to appreciate this. That was an hour and a half of my life I wasted listening to someone who wouldn’t know a rational argument if one sat on his face and sang ‘Hello Dolly’. But the worst thing is that I declined to attend a demonstration for human rights outside the Iranian Embassy because I really wanted to have this “diaologue” with Islam.

I’ll know better in future.

Some recommended websites:

Council of ex-Muslims
IslamWatch

Apostates of Islam
FaithFreedom.org

And here’s an interesting post from another blogger who’s met Tzortsis: More than I could chew?