Monday 2 June 2008

The Bishop Of Stuffup

The Bishop of Stafford, the Rt Rev Gordon Mursell, has clearly lost the plot. In an astonishing outburst in his local parish magazine, the senior Anglican bishop fumed that people who ignore global warming are "as guilty" as Josef Fritzl - denying our children a future.

While insisting that he was not accusing those who ignored the environment of being child abusers, he said a refusal to face the truth about climate change was akin to locking up future generations and "throwing away the key", according to the Telegraph.

So, let me see. A very senior member of a 2000-year-old, three-way fan club, one star of which hasn't been seen by any credible witnesses for almost all of that time, whilst the others cannot be proved to have ever existed at all, thinks everyone ought to be leaping aboard the "climate change" (remember when it was called "global warming" - until it was found not to be?) bandwagon because he thinks it's "the truth". And if we don't, we're akin to a chap who locks his daughter up in a cellar for years and years.

Even at first glance, he's not going to be the most convincing advocate for the bogeyman of environmental disaster, is he? Evidence? Reasoned deduction? Nah, no need for that, just BELIEVE! Unlike his line of work (if you can call it that) we have an awful lot of contemporary - i.e. not filtered through 2000 years of primitive perceptions, superstition and political meddling - data on the state of Earth's climate, it's past, present and likely futures. The correct interpretation of that data is ever more fiercely contested, but there is a growing feeling that the strident, "if you don't stop it you'll go blind" position of the tree-hugging brigade may have no more solid a foundation in fact than the rest of Rt Rev Gordon Mursell's outdated, superstitious stock-in-trade. It's a nice line for the credulous, and keeps its advocates in work, but that's about as far as it goes.

I suppose that a Bishop probably counts as what the media likes to call "community leaders", and I was just about to suggest that, as such, Mursell ought to behave responsibly and refrain from spreading unsubstantiated rumours. Then I remembered what he does for a living. But even so, his outburst, as reported by the Telegraph, doesn't seem to be the most effective way to promote either his environmental concerns or his day job, does it?

Billy Seggars.

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