Is Britain A Christian Nation?

 General, History, Politics, Religion  No Responses »
Apr 222014
 

In short: No.

The word nation refers to the people within the country (and technically outside too – at least those who share their identity), so the religion of a nation is the sum total of the religions of all the people within that nation.

According to the last census, approximately 60% of Britains put themselves down as “Christian”, which means that on the surface 40% are not Christian (and nearly 25% of the total are “not religious”).

But there is quite a good chance that a significant proportion of that 60% are not fully Christian in the sense that it may be easiest just to say “Christian” when asked without really meaning it. Particularly in smaller communities (and there’s still a fair number left), a lot of community social life is associated with the church.

And a lot of older people will remember a time when choosing “Church of England” was the closest you could get to choosing “No religion”.

But even if 60% of the population is Christian, then we still cannot say that Britain is a Christian nation – too many people belong to other religions or none at all and claiming that we are a Christian nation excludes those others.

But is Britain a Christian state?

Well yes, and no.

The Church of England is an established church; whereas the Church in Wales, and the Church of Scotland are not. Meaning that if you live in England there is an official state religion but in other parts of Britain there is not. To add to the confusion, the Church in Wales is a daughter church of the Church of England.

But whilst the Church of England is an established church, most of the rights and privileges of an established church have been stripped away over the years. The remaining rump of rights is rather negligible with one exception – the head of state is also the head of the Church of England.

But the monarch has rather less power in reality than in practice. The current queen could in theory dissolve parliament at any time she chose; in practice parliament is most likely to ignore her wishes. Similarly if the queen were to start interfering with the Church of England, the Archbishop is likely to politely but firmly ignore her.

Similarly being a member of the Church of England does not in practice give you any special advantages; nor does a non-member suffer any significant disadvantages. The only disadvantage I can think of is that if I were somehow to become a candidate to become the next king, I would be excluded from the succession because I’m not a Christian; but there are other far more significant obstacles.

But is our culture influenced by Christian values? That is an impossible question to answer unless you specify which values and allow me to point out that many so-called Christian values are in fact values shared by anyone without regard to religion.

We do have a Christian past. And a pagan past. And many other influences from the past. All of which influence the values of Britons today.

Easter: Named After A Pagan God

 Religion  No Responses »
Apr 182014
 

For the next few days, Christians will be going on about how the true message of Easter is about their religion. Well they’re welcome to their views of course, but there’s no reason why the rest of us should not celebrate Easter in our own way.

Usually by eating tons of Easter eggs of course.

The interesting thing is that the name Easter comes from a pagan god – Ēostre. And in the pagan past of England (before Bede), we used to hold feasts in her honour throughout the month of what is now called April. Which evolved into a month of celebrating the “resurrection” of Jesus and eventually became the modern Easter.

Yet another pagan custom that Christians stole.

Pistorius: Guilty Of Manslaughter?

 General  No Responses »
Apr 162014
 

After the carpet coverage of the trial of Oscar Pistorius in the media – you do have to wonder why – it is hard to imagine that anyone doesn’t have an opinion on whether he’s guilty or not.

My opinion is that despite the level of coverage, we have not heard enough information to have a sensible opinion. Those in the trial are getting a lot more information than we get (thankfully!), and hopefully they will have enough information to make a properly informed decision.

If Oscar’s story about how he killed Reeva is true then he is guilty. Guilty of stupidity. Of course we don’t lock up people for being stupid, so it’ll have to be manslaughter or unlawful killing, or something. And when you come down to it, being found guilty and then being punished for something will be good for Oscar psychologically if he’s a normal human.

Because when you come down to it, picking up a firearm and shooting blind at an unknown person through a door is not a sensible act. He may have thought he was shooting someone who had broken in, but he should have made sure.

Heartbleed: Let’s All Kick The OpenSSL Developers

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Apr 152014
 

One of the interesting aspects of Heartbleed are some of the criticisms of OpenSSL, the relevant developers, and open source.

Isn’t this the fault of the OpenSSL developers?

Yes, but …

Whilst it is very easy to blame the OpenSSL developers, and ultimately they were the ones who made the mistake of introducing this vulnerability, it is not quite that simple.

What has become clear is that the OpenSSL is chronically underfunded with less than four active developers (only one of whom is full time). This is despite the fact that OpenSSL is probably in roughly 1/2 of all software products including products from technology giants such as Cisco, IBM, HP, Lenovo, etc.

If OpenSSL is underfunded, everyone who makes use of the library in their products should look into why they should not be contributing towards the product. Surely every one of the technology giants could afford to contribute the cost of one developer each towards the project?

Isn’t this the fault of the open source methodology?

No.

Every time a vulnerability crops up, someone blames the development model for the vulnerability. But when you come down to it, both open source and closed source projects contain vulnerabilities.

In theory it is possible for open source to be more secure. Because the source code is publicly available, it can be audited by independent researchers. And that is effectively what seems to have happened – a Google researcher found the vulnerability and informed the OpenSSL developers of the problem.

What went wrong is that the audit happened after the release of the code. To be more secure than closed source, open source needs to be audited before the code is released. Perhaps some automated system that checks every code check in.

Is it the fault of the C programming language?

No, it’s the programmer’s mistake.

But C does make it easy to make mistakes with memory handling although we have to remember that half of this bug was a different sort of mistake – trusting user supplied data. And no matter what kind of language you are using, if you trust user supplied data then attackers everywhere will be chortling.

Back to C’s memory handling. C is a very old programming language and expects the programmer to safely deal with memory management. The best programmers can do this safely, but even those programmers have the occasional Friday afternoon and most programmers are not that good.

A more modern system programming language such as Go or Rust would be very helpful in reducing the possibility of certain types of errors, and there’s a great deal to be said for switching to one or other.

But OpenSSL is written in C, and switching now would be very difficult especially as the OpenSSL library needs to maintain compatibility with hundreds or thousands of programs written to call functions within a C library. Even if that compatibility problem were overcome, rewriting OpenSSL in some other language is an enormous amount of work which is hard to do with just four developers.

US Citizens Helped Fund a 9/11

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Apr 142014
 

It’s a bit ridiculous to compare the two, but if you look at the number of casualties involved, the 9/11 terrorist incident which caused around 2,900 casualties is very roughly comparable in size to The Troubles (with some 3,500 casualties). Of course the troubles consisted of many small incidents over a period of 30-odd years.

During that time, one of the IRA‘s (the “Official IRA”, the “Provisional IRA” and the INLA) principle source of funds were the groups NORAID and Clan na Gael. Which were based in the USA, and raised funds from supporters in the USA.

Or in other words, some US citizens were helping to fund a 9/11.

What’s more anyone who reads the history of the IRA is made very aware that the IRA regarded the US as a safe haven for their “soldiers”.

It’s interesting to contemplate using some the war on terror’s weapons against some US citizens :-

  • Extra-ordinary rendition of US citizens to concentration camps excluded from the protection of the law – so they could be tortured.
  • Freezing of the assets of some US citizens suspected of helping to fund terrorism.

It is perhaps a useful tool to consider whether certain counter-terrorism tactics are a step too far.

 

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