Cuuuurrrfeeeewww!!!

According to The Times, a fifteen-year-old has sued the police ’” successfully ’” claiming that a curfew law is in violation of his human right to hang around shopping centres of an evening.

And I say well done to him. That is excellent. I’ve long been of the opinion that this ‘I’ll Keep The Whole Class Back After School Until One Of You Owns Up’ mentality is wrong on almost every level. The moral implications are obvious ’” you’re restricting the rights of wholly innocent children because someone else who looks similar comitted a crime ’” but quite aside from that it patently doesn’t work. The more you do the the whole class, the less likely anyone is to confess. Before long they’re not only confessing to taking Katie’s pencil, but also to keeping the class back two hours (again, illegally), and ruining playtime for everyone.

People have long been of the opinion that you can do this kind of thing to children and it’s okay. It’s not. There’s just a kind of understanding that you don’t actually have to listen to children because they’re young and naïve and nobody listened to you when you were fifteen so why should you listen to them? Heck, why aren’t they down’t pit where they should be? Damn whippersnappers. (The answer, of course, being that there are no pits any more and therefore children only go down there on school trips.)

So, a few kids commit crimes. Arrest them, then. That’s what prisons are for. You put criminals there so they won’t commit crimes any more. It’s a good system, and it works. You’ll notice that this kind of rule against any other group is called Discrimination. Men are still allowed in pubs. Footballers are still allowd in Majestyk. There’s no Muslim curfew on public transport that stops Islam belivers using the Tube in rush hour, and rightly so. And religion is something you can change ’” the only way to not be a child any more is to wait a few years until the government arbitrarily deems you old enough that your opinion matters.

On the last episode of Anne Widdecombe To The Rescue, in which she dispences quick-fix solutions to pepole’s problems, she was faced with some children who were lazy. They’d eat their parents’ food. ‘They don’t see it as theft,’ their parents explained. ‘Do they ask permission?’ Anne queried. ‘No.’ ‘Well, then it is theft,’ Her solution? ‘Tell them if they don’t get jobs, you’ll sell their television.’ Bear in mind that the television set in question had been given to them by their grandmother. You’ll notice here that a prominent conservative MP has just denounced stealing a Kit Kat from your parents, and then less than a minute later advocated stealing a television from your own son and selling it. And these ’˜children’ were about twenty. They’re old enough to vote, drive cars, buy alcohol, but apparently not old enough to keep their own property.

Mind you, religion is a tricksy one. It gets you coming and going’” you’re not allowed to discriminate on the grounds of religion, but neither are you allowed to question the beliefs. If, say, I choose to voice the opinion that religion is frankly pretty dangerous and should probably be banned, that is massively politically incorrect. (I don’t actually hold so strong an opinion, but it’s a damn good example.) It’s frowned upon even to suggest that perhaps a god capable of creating the entire world is unlikely to resemble a chimera of various animals from Earth or care if you cut your hair, eat the wrong meat, work weekends or wear the wrong boxers. But the fact is it religion can be very dangerous. Observe:

Religion is an excuse. People use it as an excuse to fight long wars, but also as an excuse to help each other out. It’s very strange but that’s what happens. People generally want to be nice but feel they need an excuse. But you can use the same techniques to more-or-less brainwash them, and you can’t stop them because that’s Discrimination.

The Pope says contraception is wrong and there’s overpopulation and an AIDS epidemic in Africa. These events aren’t unrelated. Tell me that’s sane. There’s nothing in the Bible about contraception. There can’t be; it hadn’t been invented when the Bible was written. They’re contributing to one of the biggest killers in human history and you won’t convince them to stop because they’re Entitled To Their Beliefs, whatever exactly that means.

Religion is also used as a very powerful argumentative tool. You’d never convince a school board to ban evolution because you thought perhaps it wasn’t true but didn’t have any evidence. You’d cartainly never persuade someone to blow themselves up simply as a favour. But the trouble is, there is no comeback to the religion argument. You aren’t allowed to suggest that their beliefs are, perhaps, total balderdash, even when those beliefs are corrupting the education of a generation of children, albeit American children.

There was a piece in the news a few days ago saying that some Muslim women were offended that people looked at them suspiciously on the train. And do you know what they were wearing when they said this? They were covered from head to foot in black fabric save for a thin strip to see out of. Now, call me paranoid if you like, but were I a terrorist, that’s what I’d wear. Nobody would recognise me and if I was questioned about why I was so clearly hiding my identity from security staff I’d simply play the religion card and they’d run away scared. If possible I would design a religion that requires me to carry a ticking rucksack. Hoodies. Hoodies are banned in a lot of places. The official reason? ‘They obscure people’s faces from CCTV cameras.’ And what happened when they were banned? Crime fell by half overnight and profits rose by a quarter. So why allow people to wear something that covers their entire body simply because they have a book that advocates it? Criminals are bound to catch on sooner or later. Maybe they already have and we haven’t caught them yet.

To be honest even without that I think those outfits are hardly a healthy message to give to young women. Not exactly Girl Power, is it?

At university they had a policy of photographing everyone. There’s a photo on the wall to this day of what is essentially a black shape with glasses one. What’s the point in that? If ID cards were introduced (which frankly I think people are far too worked up about) would that be an acceptable image on them? Could be anyone, that. That’s the picture they use in videogame manuals from the early nineties to depict the big boss. What if your religion banned fingerprints and biometrics? Would you have a card that just said ‘N/A’?

Don’t get me wrong. You’re free to believe whatever you want’” well, no, that isn’t true at all. It’s actually rather a pet peeve of mine. I’ve been told a million times I should believe in a lot of things, but I simply can’t. I can’t believe, for example, that God created the world 6000 years ago any more than I can believe the sky is green, because I’ve seen it and it isn’t. You won’t make me believe something against all known evidence simply by repeating it or threatening me with eternal damnation in another place I don’t believe in if I don’t.

The worst example, though, to my mind is people who change their religion to marry someone. The logic there goes as follows: ‘I love this man, therefore Jesus is Lord’. It’s physically not possible to believe something simply by wanting to. You need convincing. Otherwise you’re just going through the motions, and that’s just wasting everyone’s time.

You’re free, I should say, to believe whatever you believe, but if you have no actual reason to believe it beyond ‘it says so in this book’ and ‘my parents told me’, then I’d rather you didn’t try to claim that your arbitrary prejudice is as valid a stance as my well-reasoned and thought out opinion. And if you’ve thought about it and don’t know, it’s alright simply to say ‘I don’t know’. That’s why God gave us the word ’˜Agnostic’. Or didn’t. Whatever.