Magic Statistics

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams recently toured Sudan and spoke against what he sees as a terrible abuse of human rights. One might have thought he was referring to the Sudanese government's ethnic cleansing campaign against the people of Darfur in western Sudan. But no:

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has launched a scathing attack on Guantanamo Bay, condemning the US prison camp as an "extraordinary legal anomaly".

Speaking during an eight-day visit to Sudan, Dr Williams said yesterday that detaining people indefinitely when they had not been convicted, and denying them proper legal rights, set a dangerous precedent.

The archbishop said: "Any message given, that any state can just over-ride some of the basic habeas corpus-type provisions, is going to be very welcome to tyrants elsewhere in the world, now and in the future. What, in 10 years' time, are people going to be able to say about a system that tolerates this?"

One wonders if Abp Williams has his foreign policy priorities straight. Guantanamo Bay holds 500 prisoners. In Darfur, however, 300,000 people have been killed; another two million forced to flee their homes for refugee camps; militias backed by the Sudanese government employ rape and other atrocities as weapons of war; famine continues to threaten those who remain. But those abuses of human rights were not worth mentioning.

When the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, was touring Sudan, he could not have failed to see rows of attack helicopters bristling with rockets and cannon lined up beside the runway of almost every airport. These Russian-supplied gunships are helping lay waste to Darfur, where Sudan's regime is waging a war against its own people.

Yet anyone following the Archbishop's public statements in Sudan would never have guessed that this conflict - one of the world's bloodiest - was raging barely a few hundred miles away. The only human rights abuses that appeared to worry Dr Williams were those taking place on the far side of the world in Guantanamo Bay.

Referring to Guantanamo, Abp Williams said, "What, in 10 years' time, are people going to be able to say about a system that tolerates this?" Some may be wondering—now—why Abp Williams did not speak out against mass murder when he was face-to-face with the perpetrators?

Today's Independent carries an article outlining the medical benefits derived from animal testing. Here's a snippet:

[A]ccording to an extensive investigation in 2002 into animal experiments by the House of Lords, all reputable scientific and medical organisations in every country of the world say that animal research has been crucial in the understanding of health and disease. The Department of Health's submission to the Lords' inquiry was clear about the critical role played by animal experiments. Research on animals has contributed to almost every medical advance of the last century, it said.

Among the diseases for which treatments have been developed with the aid of animal testing are polio, kidney disease, cystic fibrosis, and tuberculosis.

No scientist enjoys using animals for medical experiments, but the benefits are undeniable. I am one of thousands fortunate enough to be alive because of animal testing that "led directly to the development of dialysis machines". My kidneys failed without warning in January 2005 (it's a long story), and dialysis was needed for about three weeks until they recovered.

Previous related post: Oxford students stand up to animal rights terrorists

Rev Harry Lehotsky, a courageous man, speaks out in The Winnipeg Sun about discrimination in favour of some aboriginal religious ceremonies. Aboriginal elders are invited to open public meetings with prayers, but no invitations are extended to representatives of other faiths. Christian observances have been removed from schools, but now children are being indoctrinated in aboriginal spirituality.

When the Lord’s Prayer was removed from the official opening exercises in public schools, I was OK with that. I felt that non-believing teachers forcing children to recite a prayer they didn’t understand or agree with would actually trivialize the prayer and the belief system.

But I noticed that, even as the Lord’s Prayer was removed and Christmas celebrations neutered, children were increasingly being indoctrinated through publicly funded powwows and other aboriginal spiritual ceremonies. I saw a real contradiction.

We live in a pluralistic society. I’m not against powwows, smudging, and sweats. I’m not talking about substituting one form of ceremonial observance with another. I’m talking about an acceptance and affirmation of diversity.

A question for government: Should the criteria for funding social initiatives include funding religious indoctrination to one particular form of aboriginal worship?

Some aboriginal leaders have been denied public funding and excluded by aboriginal bureaucracies because they do not want to participate in favoured religious rituals. In this connection, Rev Lehotsky reminds us that God doesn't care about outward ceremony as much as the behaviour of those who claim to worship him.

via raskolnikov at Dust My Broom, who relates from his personal experience:

What I find wonderfully ironic is when, after the cleansing rituals and respectful platitudes have been completed, the people present, the same ones who just smudged to cleanse themselves, go on to insult, backstab and lie, something I have seen more than once at a meeting and couldn’t help pondering as the last whiffs of sweetgrass disappeared amid the yelling and accusations.