Faith in faith...

AC Grayling is on the money as usual, in a scathing attack on John Denham in the Guardian yesterday he picks apart the logic of establishing a so called panel of religious "experts" to help shape Government policy. There are a couple of points in the piece that I hadn't considered which I've extracted in this post,

- Exactly what proportion of the population do "faith groups" actually represent, presumably this means church or mosque attending clergy and people, I thought that was less than 10% now, and getting smaller?

- What is it about the views and practices of the "faith based" groups that we don't know or don't understand? haven't we had a belly full of these views and methods over the last few thousand years?

- What exactly about "faith" based groups instils community cohesion, most of the time they are at each other's throats, even within Christianity there are huge schisms, if you pull out all of the "common" elements of these various religions, i.e. the ones that are universal then you are simply left with Humanism?

- Northern Ireland is a great case study for what happens when you promote faith schools, division, ghettoisation and entrenchment perpetuating ancient divisions, is this what we want more of?

- If the "panel" is assembled according to the actual religious demographics of this country then (assuming there are 20 people in it) it would look something like:

14 Christians (various flavours)
5 Non-religious
0.5 Muslims (presumably the top half?)
Various assorted hands, fingers, toes and other (smaller) body fragments

I'm sure Denham is simply towing the party line on this, so it probably isn't even his idea, however I also read that the Southampton  Itchen seat which JD represents is one considered by Labour to be "highly at risk" in the next general election, hopefully this turns out to be true!