A complaint has been lodged against Cherie Booth QC by the National Secular Society for giving someone a suspended sentence "because he was a religious person" [BBC News 4 Feb 2010, Independent 4 Feb 2010]
According to most news reports, Shamso Miah (25) was in court for breaking another man's jaw in a fight about queue-jumping in an Essex bank. Is there something particularly British or God-fearing about this crime?
Not to be confused with Shamsu Miah (52) who killed and ate a swan while fasting during Ramadan [The Times, 23 Nov 2006, Sky News, 27 Feb 2008]. The Telegraph has the best headline: Muslim does bird for eating swan. He was jailed for two months because, according to District Judge Andrew Shaw, killing a swan at night with a knife "is a taboo act". The concept of "taboo" comes from Polynesian religion, and in Māori society the concept was often used to protect resources from over-exploitation [Wikipedia: Tapu], but I didn't know it had been incorporated into English law.
If Cherie Booth allows her judgements to be influenced by a generic category of "religious person", this appears to be consistent with a wishy-washy view of religion that some people have associated with The Tony Blair Faith Foundation. The Catholic Church has been particularly unenthusiastic about the Faith Foundation, and Professor Michel Schooyans of the Catholic University of Louvain has accused Blair and his wife of wishing to reduce all religions "to the same common denominator, which means stripping them of their identity" [Guardian, 13 May 2009].
I wonder where Polynesian religions belong in the Blairs' worldview. Would a noble savage with an ancestor cult be let off lightly in the Booth court? How about a devout cannibal? Or do only certain religions count?
Meanwhile, Booth's decision has prompted some more general questions about religion. On BBC Radio Four, Eddie Mair asks Are religious people more likely to be honest? Is it a coincidence that the Chilcot enquiry has just put Tony Blair's own honesty under the spotlight, while sparing others? [The media's tall tales over Iraq]
Finally, Andrew Brown of the Guardian complains that "everything we know about the case of Shamso Miah seems to come from one agency report of the court case" [Cherie Booth unfair to atheists]. As if this is unusual.
Update: How about the case of Lorraine Mbulawa? 'Possessed' teenager who stabbed her own mother five times is allowed to walk free after judge accepts she 'has strong spiritual beliefs'. (Daily Mail, 24 May 2011)
Friday, February 05, 2010
Tuesday, February 02, 2010
What if architects designed our communities?
@juliandobson #bloggerscircle Another random blogpost with an interesting link to my previous attempt on the Purpose of Diversity.
Julian Dobson finds a simulated picture of a group of people enjoying a new building. He notes the lack of diversity in the picture - everyone is young, thin and able-bodied, the couples are straight, and even the dog is white. According to the distinction I made in my previous post on the Purpose of Diversity, the diversity that this lacks is imaginary diversity - diversity of the image.
Julian Dobson finds a simulated picture of a group of people enjoying a new building. He notes the lack of diversity in the picture - everyone is young, thin and able-bodied, the couples are straight, and even the dog is white. According to the distinction I made in my previous post on the Purpose of Diversity, the diversity that this lacks is imaginary diversity - diversity of the image.
As some of the comments below Julian's blog point out, pictures like these may not be produced by architects themselves, but they are produced within a system supposedly governed by Architecture and whatever values it purports to represent. The picture causes us to wonder what kind of community (if any) this system has any interest in.
Because the picture doesn't just lack diversity, it also lacks community. The people in the picture are not gathered in groups, they are standing alone or in couples, checking their mobile phones, not looking at each other. Some people are taking photos of thin air. There is a toddler, apparently without any parents, attracting no attention whatsoever. This is not how people behave in public, except perhaps in some autistic fantasy.
As Julian says, "Buildings are only of value, surely, at the point when they're used, animated by or engaged with by people" - and surely this applies to open spaces as well. But the picture shows some aimless and disengaged people in a meaningless space. So this does not tell us a good story about the de facto purpose of Architecture as it is practised, not as in the books of idealistic architectural theories but under the social and commercial constraints of the Real World.
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