What's up at the Christian Party?

Its seems that not all is well at the Christian Party. The party has been fined £2,750 by the Electoral Commission for failing to provide accounts. The fine has been levied on party leader Rev George Hargreaves.

From the Electoral Commission web site:

Legal action to recover two fines totalling £2,750, imposed on Reverend George Hargreaves, Treasurer of the Christian Party “Proclaiming Christ’s Lordship” has been initiated.
The first fine was originally £500 for failure to provide accounts by the deadline of 7 July 2011. This automatically increased to £750 because it was not paid. A second fine of £2,000 is for Reverend Hargreaves’ failure to comply with a notice requiring accounts to be delivered to the Commission by 1 March 2012.

Full article here.

The Christian Party holds quite a fundamentalist position with policies that include:

• "a science curriculum which should "reflect the evidence of creation/design" in the universe."
• "replacing the standard of 'beyond reasonable doubt' with the more biblical 'evidence of two or three reliable witnesses' in the criminal justice system."
• and rather oddly (until you relaise that Rev Hargreaves earns part of his income from songwriting royalties)  "that Mechanical Copyright Protection enjoyed by songwriters should be extended to featured recording artists and record producers."

This may be why it has never got any electoral traction. In the 2010 United Kingdom general election, the party stood 71 candidates, gaining 18,623 votes.

I notice that their web site currently carries a copy of an election leaflet for a candidate standing in an election  in July 2011, but with the date misprinted as 2001:

Loch Ness Monster being used as evidence against evolution by some American schools

The famous "surgeon's photo",
now known to be a fake created
using a toy submarine and some  Plasticine.

As reported in the Herald newspaper and elsewhere:

Thousands of children in the southern state will receive publicly-funded vouchers for the next school year to attend private schools where Scotland's most famous mythological beast will be taught as a real living creature. These private schools follow a fundamentalist curriculum including the Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) programme to teach controversial religious beliefs aimed at disproving evolution and proving creationism.
One tenet has it that if it can be proved that dinosaurs walked the earth at the same time as man then Darwinism is fatally flawed.
Critics have damned the content of the course books, calling them "bizarre" and accusing them of promoting radical religious and political ideologies.
The textbooks in the series are alleged to teach young earth creationism; are hostile towards other religions and other sectors of Christianity, including Roman Catholicism; and present a biased version of history that is often factually incorrect.
One ACE textbook – Biology 1099, Accelerated Christian Education Inc – reads: "Are dinosaurs alive today? Scientists are becoming more convinced of their existence. Have you heard of the 'Loch Ness Monster' in Scotland? 'Nessie' for short has been recorded on sonar from a small submarine, described by eyewitnesses, and photographed by others. Nessie appears to be a plesiosaur."
Another claim taught is that a Japanese whaling boat once caught a dinosaur. It's unclear if the movie Godzilla was the inspiration for this lesson.

However there are over thirty Schools following this curriculum in the UK. You will find a list here. This is a worrying trend as the claims made above are dubious, to say the least.

For example, the statement "Nessie appears to be a plesiosaur" is probably based on photographs taken by an expedition led by Robert Rines in 1975 (not Sir Peter Scott, as is often thought - he just coined the latin name "nessiteras rhombopteryx" after seeing the photographs). However, the photos were considerably enhanced by Nasa's jet propulsion laboratory and then manually retouched. Modern computer enhancements of the original images do not show up anything that looks like a plesiousaur flipper. You can see the original image and the enhancements here. Make up your own mind!

It has to be said, however, that Loch Ness does not contain enough fish to feed a breeding population of sea creatures and there are any number of reasonable explanations for the things seen on the loch's surface, most due to its great depth and the way that wind and currents interact).

So how does this reflect on theology and religion? Well, the arguments for and against young earth creationism are all well rehearsed. I have covered them many times before and a summary of my objections can be found here. The fundamental contradiction of this Loch Ness monster example is that it presents speculation as fact, and that's not science.

Its not just Scientology and Wikipedia

In case you haven't heard, Wikipedia has banned IP addresses owned by the Church of Scientology from making edits to articles. But it's not just Scientology that's at it. Other religious groups are equally as concerned about the free exchange of opinions about their activities. Free discussion does not fit well with most religions and truth seems to be an issue of opinion rather than fact. Hence the founding of Conservapedia by American right wing Christians which gives a version of the truth which is less offensive to them.

"I've tried editing Wikipedia, and found that the biased editors who dominate it censor or change facts to suit their views," Andy Schlafly, the founder of Conservapedia, told the Guardian. "In one case my factual edits were removed within 60 seconds - so editing Wikipedia is no longer a viable approach." (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/mar/02/wikipedia.news)

Religious groups don't like the Internet. I had my own encounter with a local religious group on Wikipedia last year. It is not likely to end any time soon.