Tag Archives: BBC

What Is Truth?

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I’m sceptical (or skeptical if you’re in the US). It’s a legacy of my years of believing the promises of Christianity. Preachers, pastors, Bible study leaders told me for 25 years that the promises of the bible, of Jesus himself, were all true. And like a fool I believed them. Jesus had made a new creature out of me; he loved me; he was guiding my life; he was returning soon; I’d be resurrected; I’d live in heaven forever… and on and on.

What a preposterous set of propositions! It took my Great Realisation, my own personal revelation that there was no God, to make me see how ridiculous they were.

It is this that left me with a legacy of scepticism. If I’d been misled all this time by people I respected and admired, what else was I accepting as true that very well might not be? I wasn’t going to be fooled again and so began to question practically everything I was told by authorities, experts and the media. If it seemed ‘off’, as we say these days, not quite right or too good (or bad) to be true I asked, ‘Who says so?’, ‘How do they know this?’, ‘What is the evidence?’, ‘Do they jump to conclusions or is their reasoning sound?’, ‘Why should I believe what they say?’ It’s exhausting, I assure you, having to search out the evidence – the primary sources of information – and to sift through it, recognising any bias that has been imposed on it. It’s either this or I must accept without question that everything I’m told is true. I can’t do that any more.

Here are a few examples of claims that I’ve been sceptical of on the recent past:

We are being guided by the science, said politicians during Covid to ensure compliance with whatever lockdown measures were being imposed. Did this really just mean was ‘we are being guided by our interpretation of some rather suspect data’? It became clear after we emerged from the hysteria surrounding the pandemic that this was the case.

Tens of thousands will die of Covid unless you comply: this based on computer predictions which turned out to be very far from accurate: the suspect data that ‘guided’ politicians.

A woman can have a penis. A man can have cervix. Yes, our politicians told us this during our recent fixation with transgenderism. Whatever you think of people changing sex, these two statements, designed to change hearts and minds, if not penises and cervixes, are patently false. Whatever was guiding those who said such things, it certainly wasn’t ‘the science’.

No more irresponsible, undeliverable promises. So said the Prime Minister exactly a year ago. I’m not going to be sceptical or cynical about this. I feel sure it’ll turn out to be true. Is he implying though that promises made earlier than this were indeed ‘irresponsible and undeliverable’. Surely not.

We will not raise taxes on working people (and energy prices will fall by £300 in the long term), Labour politicians, now the government, said only last year in an attempt to gain our votes. I was sceptical about this, as with much they said, and for the first time in many years Labour did not get my vote. Taxes have increased considerably for working people and everyone else in the last year and are set to rise again this week. The price of energy has risen too, by 18%, and will do so again in January. A £300 reduction by 2030, if it happens at all, is not really going to offset this by much. This was all very predictable; since when do politicians tell us the truth in order to get us to vote for them?

Anything Donald Trump says. Insert your selection here.

The NHS is the envy of the world. Pundits and politicians are very fond of this one. They like to add too that the NHS is underfunded. But the NHS is expensive, management heavy and wasteful. Is it really the envy of the world, and if it is, so what, when it’s constantly in crisis at home?

The BBC is the envy of the world. It is impartial and balanced. Is it? A number of independent reviews have determined that it has its own agendas and biases. During lockdowns it fuelled hysteria and now contributes to climate change panic. Rather than reporting facts, it tells us too often what we’re meant to think about issues. It has also been rocked over the past dozen years by sleaze and scandals.

Islam is a religion of peace. So many questions about this one. Many Western politicians have claimed something like it. President George W. Bush did, shortly after 9/11. Perhaps ordinary Muslims are committed to peace but there are many Islamists (the term now used for Muslim extremists) are evidently not: as well as 9/11 there have been acts of Islamist terrorism in London (7th July 2005), at Charlie Hebdo in Paris, in Manchester, the slaughter in the street of an off duty soldier, the massacre of Israeli young people in October 2023, the killing of Christians and others in Nigeria.. Is ‘Allahu Akbar’ really a cry of peace?

We can halt or reverse the climate changes we ourselves have caused. Can we? Who says? (Greta Thunberg, yes, but no actual scientists that I can find.) We can perhaps mitigate and slow down the change, and we should. But the climate will continue to change. Are these changes solely the fault of us humans – we’re contributing to the pace of change, certainly – when the climate has been in constant change from time immemorial?

I was accused of trying to be a maverick in a recent comment on an old post. Honestly, I’m not. It’s more a case of ‘once bitten, twice shy’; I’m not going to be told ever again what to think, especially not by those who don’t present good reasons why I should (I’ve Jesus to thank for this). Everything needs to be questioned, otherwise our minds are not our own. Be sceptical.

Why I’m not watching the News any more

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I’ve reached the point where I can’t watch or read mainstream news reports. I’ve had difficulty with them throughout the pandemic with their incessant reporting of Covid cases and deaths completely devoid of context (how many cases were serious enough to cause hospitalisations? How many deaths were ‘of’ Covid rather than ‘with’ it? How many of the deaths were excess deaths; how many people die in any given period normally?) Ignoring context, the media became intent on fostering anxiety and panic. Their reporting was not independent; in the UK at least they parroted uncritically and relentlessly the government’s position. This, in turn, was shaped by the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) and in particular the predictions of computer modeller Neil Ferguson. Ferguson, regularly interviewed on BBC news programmes, was, as he now admits, wrong on every occasion. Very wrong. The pandemic was nowhere near as drastic as he repeatedly said it was going to be (I’m not disputing how serious it was. It was not, however, anywhere as near as bad as he kept predicting it would be). Yet the government and the media continued to rely on his predictions as if they were fact.

All of which is the reason I reduced my watching, listening and reading of the news to a minimum. Headlines only. Early in the summer of this year, the UK government felt the need to restore some normality to society, it asked the mainstream media to reduce its reporting of Covid statistics. All media outlets immediately complied. Conservatives can never say again that the BBC in particular is biased against them; it has done their bidding throughout the pandemic.

This is not, however, the reason I am abandoning the news, giving up even on headlines. I am tired of predictions, conjecture, speculation, forecasts and extrapolation. None of these is news. They are attempts to see the future, something that we are incapable of doing. Of course we need to be aware of potential consequences of decisions or actions, our own, governments’ and society’s. But reporting those possible consequences as fact, as outcomes that are inevitable, fait accompli, like Neil Ferguson’s hopeless predictions, is not what news reporting should be about. Its job is to tell us what has happened, how, where and possibly why (analysis). That it extends itself well beyond this by determining for us what a particular development means ‘for the future’ or ‘’in the long term’ is nothing more than supposition. It also, dangerously, leads to some self-fulfilling prophecy, such as we’ve seen in the reporting of recent supply chain difficulties. That these were restricted to specific areas was not reported but the possibility that these difficulties could, possibly, maybe, result in food shortages was. Result? Panic buying and food shortages in some areas. The same happened with supposed fuel shortages. Christmas is now in danger according to the UK media.

With Covid largely off the agenda, the news media find themselves in need of something else with which to fill schedules; some alternative source of doom and gloom. The mainstream (in the UK, at least) has opted for climate change, replete with forecasts of catastrophe, destruction and extinction. Of course it’s possible that if we do not act collectively to reduce the human contribution to climate change, that these outcomes will come to pass. It’s possible but it isn’t certain to be the case. Who remembers the media reporting that by this point in the 21st century we would be living in an ice age because of climate change? (This speculation is still about and has traction in some quarters).The news is that climate change is happening. That’s it. What we might do about it is for some other source that doesn’t claim to be delivering news.

I am tired of the narrative of the day, be it #MeToo, Brexit, BLM, Covid, climate change. Tired of its promotion by the media, of the prediction and conjecture that goes along with it, but only while it attracts sufficient viewers or readers. When something more ‘newsworthy’, sensational and alarmist comes along, what was once narrative of the day is dropped. There’s a new bandwagon to jump on! This time though, I’m doing the dropping first.

 

Morality Tale

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Preaches   A man who believes in the impossible – and it is a man more often than not – appears as a moral authority every morning on national BBC radio. This same man is frequently asked by television networks to give his views on moral issues of the day, be they assisted suicide, pay-day loans, same-sex marriage & adoption, abortion or capitalism. And even when he hasn’t been asked, the views he expresses on these subjects are widely reported, sometimes all around the world. The man can, in one of his roles, sit in the second most important legislative body of the land, again as a moral authority, influencing laws that are binding on everyone else whether they believe in the impossible or not. Indeed, the man has an automatic, unelected right to be part of this august body.

   Where, you might ask, does this man’s moral authority come form? Is he a psychologist with a profound understanding of human behaviour? Or a geneticist with knowledge of the biological bases of our decision making? Maybe a philosopher who has analysed the cognitive processes that lead to moral decisions? An ordinary, educated person, then, who has given much rational thought to how we might best treat one another?

   No, he’s none of these. He’s just a man who believes in the impossible and wears funny clothes to prove it. Invariably, it is true, he has become quite an expert in believing the impossible and he’s even been granted a special place in society that allows him to encourage others to believe the impossible. As a result, he has somehow made the leap into thinking that, because he believes in the impossible, he must therefore be a moral authority.

   Now, we may not object to the man believing in the impossible in the first place – it’s a free country after all – but we don’t accept, surely, that because he does, it means he knows much more than the rest of us about morality?

   Yes, I’m sorry to report that we do. We acquiesce to the man and say ‘because you believe in the impossible, and for no other reason, you must know more about morality than we do.’ And when we are looking for moral guidance, we turn to him – whether we are the BBC, the rest of the media or the government – and we say, ‘what do you say about this? What should we think about it, because, after all, you are the authority here by virtue of the fact that you believe in the impossible?’ And the man, in whatever guise he appears – pope, archbishop, bishop, reverend, imam, rabbi – says, ‘this is what it says in my magic book (even when it doesn’t) and you should follow it, even though you might not believe in either the magic book or in the impossible.

   And we say, ‘Well, you’re the expert and we respect that you should tell us how to behave, if for no other reason than you believe in the impossible.’