Blasphemy is Back

The blasphemy law was abolished in March 2008 but is creeping back through claims of Islamophobia by both Islamic extremists and the Left.

The latest example of a growing attack on freedom of expression happened at the London School of Economics this week.

It started when the LSE Atheist Secular Humanist Society (ASH) posted a Jesus and Mo cartoon (see above) on their Facebook page. They did this in support of University College London ASH who had run into trouble with their Union after a few Muslims complained about the cartoon on their Facebook page.

The LSE Students Union (LSESU) told the group that unless it removed the cartoon from its Facebook page, it could be expelled from the Union because ‘posting these cartoons was in breach of Students’ Union policy on inclusion’ and that they ‘strongly condemn and stand against any form of racism and discrimination on campus’.

In a statement on behalf of LSE ASH, its President Chris Moos said:
‘There are no reasonable grounds for the LSESU’s instruction because we are in no way violating their policies or byelaws. The cartoons on our Facebook page criticise religion in a satirical way and we totally reject any claim that their publications could constitute any sort of harassment or intimidation of Muslims or Christians.

‘That there was no deliberate intention to offend is illustrated by the fact that the cartoons were posted only on the LSESU ASH page and not in other spaces. But even if some people are offended, offence is not a sufficient reason for certain artistic and satirical forms of expression to be prohibited. A university should hold no idea sacred and be open to the critiquing of all ideas and ideologies'.

An Emergency General Meeting was held at LSE on Thursday. The Union noted ‘That Islamophobia is a form of anti-Islamic racism’. The motion passed by 339 votes to 179. The voting bloc of 339 contained people from Far Left groups as well as Muslims. The Union resolved:

- To define Islamophobia as “a form of racism expressed through the hatred or fear of Islam, Muslims, or Islamic culture, and the stereotyping, demonisation or harassment of Muslims, including but not limited to portraying Muslims as barbarians or terrorists, or attacking the Qur’an as a manual of hatred”,

- To take a firm stance against all Islamophobic incidents at LSE and conduct internal investigations if and when they occur.

You can listen to the debate at the EGM here.

A spokesperson from the National Federation of Atheist Humanist and Secular Student Societies said: ‘This is not the first time that an AHS member has been caught up in a row over published material. In 2008, Warwick Atheists caused controversy with a poster showing religious symbols being put in a bin. Leeds and Southampton Atheists have both experienced intimidation when they proposed showing material that some Muslims took offence to’.

Schoolboy and campaigner against quack medicines Rhys Morgan also ran into trouble when he posted the same cartoon on his Facebook page. He received a barrage of hate mail and faced serious disciplinary action from his school.

In a separate incident, a debate at Queen Mary College about sharia had to be cancelled when a Muslim man filmed people there and threatened to kill them if they said anything negative about the Prophet.

The other side of the attack on freedom of expression comes from the probably well-intentioned but misguided liberal Left. A recent letter to the Guardian with a long list of signatories stated that 'over the past decade, a number of academic studies have indicated a worrying and disproportionate trend towards negative, distorted and even fabricated reports in media coverage of the Muslim community'. It called for an inquiry into media representation of Muslims on a par with the Leveson inquiry.

While it is true that Muslims often don’t get fair representation in the media, the conflation of religion with race and the portrayal of the Muslim community as a homogenous entity is becoming a way to blackmail and manipulate, to stop any questioning of Islamists and their activities, even the most serious attacks on human rights. Freedom of expression is being held hostage by a minority of religious extremists who are manipulating the well-intentioned but wrong-headed into silencing debate.

There are laws against inciting hatred and against attacks on individuals because of their race or religion. But Islam is not a race. And Islam is not Muslims. A religion is a set of ideas that anyone should be able to question, criticize or mock in public. It’s only through robust debate that human rights are protected, even if fundamentalist believers resent having their beliefs challenged. Only a person can be insulted, not a set of ideas.

Part of the reason the liberal left is being manipulated by extremists is the Japanese knotweed that is post-modern relativism. According to this, all truths are relative and all beliefs equally valid - even if this means that some people (for example women, LGBT and more moderate or secular/cultural believers) are not treated equally or accorded their Human Rights.

If Human Rights are mutable and vulnerable to demands from extremists and a violent minority, then they are not Universal, they are a pick and mix. If there is a hierarchy of rights, any privilege granted to one group means that other groups are seriously disadvantaged.

This relativism also forbids criticism of other cultures as colonial imperialism. It's one reason why dealing with Female Genital Mutilation and forced marriage is such a problem, for example.

If there is no freedom of expression and open debate of ideas in an academic setting, this bodes very badly for the rest of society, especially when the media and politicians either can't or won't defend free expression.

It should be made very clear that it's not just Muslims who want special consideration, there are many examples of Christian extremists claiming persecution, demanding exemption from Equality laws and trying to shut down criticism.

Other examples of how blasphemy is creeping back are here and here.

The National Secular Society’s briefing paper on Freedom of Expression is here . It has a series of useful extracts from the United Nations and Council of Europe on the defence of this Right.

The NSS submitted a response to the Police Powers Consultation to remove the word ‘insulting’ from section 5 of the Public Order Act. This states that it is an offence to use threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, or displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby.

Claiming insult on behalf of a religion is becoming another weapon to silence debate. The NSS believes that insult is too nebulous a concept and too open to abuse. Its removal would protect freedom of expression and set the bar higher for a criminal offence.

There is a rally for freedom of expression in central London on February 11.

The situation at LSE and the other colleges is still developing and I'll post updates as they happen.

31 January LSE ASH have now been 'unaffiliated' by their Students" Union.

Dorries Rides Again

This week, Nadine Dorries MP failed to get a second reading for her amendment proposing that abstinence teaching should be promoted in schools - but only to girls, which I covered here.

But there really is no getting rid of her.

Now the Government has been accused of pushing ahead with her plans to strip abortion providers of their role counselling women despite her amendment on the issue suffering a heavy defeat in the Commons last year.

MPs voted by a majority of 250 to reject the Dorries amendment in September. It was intended to make women to see ‘independent’ counsellors before they have an abortion rather than be advised by abortion providers like Marie Stopes International or the British Pregnancy Advisory Service.

Public health minister Anne Milton said just before the vote that the Government would try to implement the spirit of Dorries' proposal without the need for legislation. She said: "The Government supports the spirit of the amendments, and we intend to present proposals for regulations after consultation."

It now appears that this is exactly what has happened. It's almost enough to make you believe in Dorries' god.

Shadow public health minister Diane Abbott said she had walked out of a new cross-party abortion group set up by the Government to look at the issue of counselling following the defeat. She said: "I now believe the 'consultation' will be a front for driving through the anti-choice lobbyists' preferred option without legislation or a debate on the floor of the House."

The group has been considering three proposals:
:
The first would see abortion clinics, such as those run by the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) and Marie Stopes International, barred from providing counselling, and under a legal duty to refer women seeking it to an 'independent' service.

An second option is for voluntary registration. This would would mean any organisation offering counselling to women with a crisis pregnancy would have to meet minimum standards, and only use appropriately-trained counsellors.

The third option is to retain the current system.

As I wrote at the time, allegedly independent bodies of the kind promoted by Ms Dorries do in fact have a strong religious agenda and use a wide variety of manipulative, emotive and factually wrong tactics to talk women out of having abortions. I also wrote about how Ms Dorries manipulated facts in support of the amendment. Which is putting it politely.

For anyone who may have forgotten, this is the same Nadine Dorries who is on record as saying that her political blog is "70% fiction and 30% fact" and that "I have chosen the facts I wish to believe".

It's easy to dismiss her as someone with little influence who is easily ignored but her persistence and the apparent support of at least some parts of Government mean that she can't be ignored by anyone who cares about choice and women's rights. She really is the wasp at the picnic.

UPDATED 27 JANUARY
On Newsnight last night, Dorries and Abbott faced off. Abbott's performance was less than sparkling. Dorries made a few interesting points.

1. No abortion counsellor should have an agenda.

In theory, yes. But her idea of having an agenda is being paid by the state to do abortions, You might as well say that NHS dentists shouldn't be allowed to do fillings because they have a financial incentive. The film clip before the discussion showed so-called independent advisors with a strong religious agenda to put women off having abortions. She didn't address this.

2.Dorries says that counselling would mean 60,000 fewer abortions a year.

Her Government wants to cut Child Benefit. How does she envisage providing for these extra children? She has said this before but it's not clear where the figure comes from.

3. University-educated, middle class women who live in London are fine, they know what they want and where to get it. She is concerned for the 'vulnerable' others.

This implies that women who don't fall into her very narrow category are incapable of knowing their own minds or of dealing with what she calls a 'crisis pregnancy'. And, referring back to point 2, it would seem that there are at least 60,000 of them.

4. Dorries listed Frank Field as a pro-choice MP.
He backed her amendment so the choice he is pro would appear to be hers.

The Government says there will be a public consultation before any decision is made, possibly launched next month.

Wasps and the Evolution of Language

Just like living things, language evolves - and sometimes in the same way. When a population splits into two isolated groups, both evolve differently. *

In the 11th century, the modern French word guerre was pronounced gwerra. When the word arrived in England (courtesy of the Norman invaders after 1066), it was effectively isolated from the original language 'population' among British speakers who learnt French. The word mutated and lost the G so we pronounced it, after a few more mutations, as war. Roughly: gwerra to werre to war. Dropping the E on the end of the word is a common mutation.

Mediaeval scribes often used signs as shortcuts. In the 11th century, the word for school was written and pronounced escole (compare with escuela in Spanish, also a Romance language - which means derived from Latin). Later, it was written with an accent at the start as a scribes' sign that there was an S after the E . It's now written école and the S has been dropped from pronunciation. But before that happened, it came over here as escole, from which we got school.

The circumflex was a scribes' sign with a similar purpose, for example hôpital and forêt were pronounced hospital and forest.

People in some parts of France, like Paris, sound the E on the ends of some words as a short UH as in uh-huh. More technically it's called a schwa. So école would be écol - uh.

In the 12th century, the modern French word guêpe was written guespe and pronounced gwesp. The English mutated it by dropping the G and pronounced it wesp and then wasp.

Sometimes words split into further separate speaker populations after the initial isolation to create a kind of sub-species. In some parts of England like the West Country where I'm from, the G of guespe didn't die off but the W did. As G is not hard when followed by E (as in gesture) and the final E of guespe was sounded as a schwa, pronunciation went gwesp - jesp- jespa and that's why we yokels call wasps jaspers.

What the connection is with the old song 'Oh Sir Jasper do not touch me' is not known.


*If you're a linguist, yes I know I'm simplifying and being a little elliptical.

A Christmas Ghost Story

It's traditional to tell stories about ghosts and spirits at Christmas. Let's imagine it's a still, icy, night. Small things die silently in the dark and the light of the full moon glints on sharp, merciless teeth.

In 1990, consultant psychiatrist and hypnotherapist Dr Alan Sanderson M.B., B.S. (London), M.R.C.P., D.P.M., M.R.C. Psych. returned to clinical practice after years of 'personality research'. He found psychiatry 'still stuck in the pharmacological morass' so he came up with the Spirit Release Foundation (SRF) 'to train medical practitioners and others to help people who are troubled by spirit attachment'. The SRF's members 'share a belief in the primacy of spirit and the soul’s development through reincarnation' (although they claim not to be religious).

What might spirit attachment be? According to the website:

'A minority of those who die fail to make their transition from this physical world successfully. They become what is known as ‘earthbound’, because they remain mentally attached to the earth plane and so cannot progress. Reasons for this include a traumatic death, concern over some unfinished business or anxiety for a loved one on Earth. Attached spirits may manifest in a variety of ways. They may attach to a person, or to a place with which they were associated in life, that place becoming haunted'.

Basically, it's ghosts haunting buildings and possessing the living. Even though the therapy is aimed at medical practitioners (among others), there is no attempt at scientific evidence on the website. One practitioner does explain the mechanism on their own website: 'Everything in the universe is made up of energy, spirit release simply deals with energies most of us cannot see and for the most part are unaware of... Spirit Release is really all about how external energies can, on occasion, affect our energy system in detrimental ways'.

'Energy' is the alternative medicine practitioner's friend, an undefined, unscientific term to explain pretty much anything. It is not the capacity of a physical system to perform work. This 'energy' is not measured in joules, kilowatt-hours or kilocalories.

Diagnosis is hardly more scientific:

'Some of the more common symptoms of spirit attachment can be: lack of energy, memory disturbance, behavioural change, mood change, addictive behaviour, relationship problems and hearing disturbing voices. There may be bodily pain and other physical symptoms. The degree of attachment also varies. Some individuals are scarcely affected, while in rare cases the individual's body and mind have been taken over completely. There may, of course, be other reasons for the presence of these symptoms, which a practitioner should investigate'.

The range of symptoms is so vague and general that almost any condition can be ascribed to attachment. The caveat that there may be other reasons for symptoms has the appearance of responsibility but how many practitioners are qualified to diagnose symptoms - and then hand the patient over to medical care (thereby losing their fee)?

Why aren't doctors spotting that their patients are troubled by earthbound spirits?

'Spirit attachment is not uncommon and is often misdiagnosed because many practitioners are not aware of it and because the symptoms might fit a number of possible diagnoses. In some instances attachments exacerbate an existing complaint with similar symptoms. They may be the reason that recovery from a complaint is very slow.'

The implication is that trained doctors are getting it wrong with their insistence on using their medical training. Even if a patient has been diagnosed with a genuine medical condition, it could be made worse by spirit attachment. They really have covered all the bases.

How do they cure this terrible problem that no-one had heard of until the SRF came along?

'Spirit Release is a two fold process. Firstly it involves releasing earthbound spirits from their condition of attachment in a compassionate, non-confrontational way, by contacting the spirits and communicating with them. Spirit helpers are then called upon to move the spirit on to its rightful place in the universe. The person who has been affected by the attachment is also offered healing, counselling or other therapeutic help, including advice about psychic protection'.

So basically, they give the spirit a hug and call it a taxi? Once they've dealt with the dead, they help the living too -possibly because the dead don't have credit cards.

Pretty much anyone can be affected:

Spirit Release is also about 'freeing the ‘stuck’ aspects within ourselves that invite spirit attachment, which may involve looking at past-life patterns, ancestral karma and any difficult influences that stem from childhood or later life'.

This is their version of preventive medicine (or maximizing your market share).

Therapy takes two forms. 'The Interactive Approach involves putting a client into an altered state of consciousness, through a form of hypnosis, in order to allow any attached spirit to communicate safely through them. A dialogue ensues, in which the spirit is induced to leave'.

Hypnosis is a tricky process, it's very easy for an inexperienced or unethical therapist to plant ideas, deliberately or otherwise. There can also be issues with False Memory Syndrome. There is a huge amount of trust required - a patient is hypnotised and when they come round they're told that the spirit possessing them has been persuaded to move on. This treatment is open to considerable abuse, aided in part by the placebo effect.

Alternatively, the 'Intuitive Approach is made through the psychic awareness of the therapist who learns how to communicate directly with a spirit. This does not necessarily require the active involvement of the client. It may be practised directly or at a distance'.

There's no indication of what happens if the spirit doesn't want to leave. The process as described is very benign, very low-key and reassuring as if it's no more than having your ears syringed.

If you feel there's a spirit inside you, there's a list of practitioners in your area.

The SRF may be a small group but they shouldn't be too readily dismissed. For example, the SRF website also suggests that gender dysphoria could be caused by spirit attachment and that Spirit Release is an alternative treatment to gender realignment surgery. They are part of a larger movement ascribing a whole range of problems to spirit possession. The Christian Medical Fellowship (CMF) who are mostly GPs believe that mental illness among other problems can be caused by possession. There have been exorcists working with the NHS for forty years, as I wrote about here and you can read another piece I wrote on exorcism here.

The main problem with both the apparently cuddly SRF and the much less fluffy CMF is that practitioners' world view is predicated on unseen entities, some malevolent, some misguided. They are creating a problem and offering a solution to people who could well be in a vulnerable state and in need of proper medical attention. Even if the SRF are just treating people with more money than sense, they are dealing with people's mental and possibly physical well-being. Although the SRF claim that they are not a religious organisation, theirs is the same mentality as the churches that use violent - and sometimes fatal - methods to exorcise people, whether these are African evangelical churches or both the Catholic Church and the Church of England with their trained exorcists.

It would be interesting to know what church exorcists make of these rivals. As with religions, they can't all be right with their competing world-views of demons versus disincarnate humans.

Another problem is that anyone with a few hundred quid to spare can become a spirit release therapist. It costs £30 a year to be a member of the SRF and the Foundation Course costs £210. There's a leaflet about the upcoming London one here.

This way of thinking also leads people to blame outside agencies for problems in their lives rather than either taking responsibility or getting medical help. It can create a dependency on therapists. There's a kind of contamination theory at the root of the SRF; they are making people believe they have been 'infected' and need to be 'cured' except that they're not talking about bacteria or viruses, but the dead- truly alternative medicine.

This is a Christmas ghost story with no Tiny Tim happy ending.

Happy Families?

The Government is trying to rebuild society on the basis of a Victorian card game. But only a minority of people now live in a family like Mrs Bun the Baker's wife, Mr Plod the policeman or Miss Dose the Doctor's daughter

The Government's flagship free schools and academies have to sign up to strict rules introduced by Education Secretary Michael Gove to teach children the ‘nature of marriage’ and its ‘importance’ for family life and bringing up children.

Religious and political campaigners against gay marriage claim that marriage is only for a man and a woman and that allowing gay marriage would undermine the bedrock of society and destroy family life.

But now there is research by think-tank the Centre for the Modern Family (funded by Scottish Widows) which shows that eight out of 10 people describe their family set‐up as not the traditional two married parents and two or more children. Just 16% of people define themselves as part of this kind of family that the Government thinks is under threat.

Although the Government and religious campaigners might see it as their mission to repair society and restore their concept of family values, they are increasingly out of step with the people they claim to represent who are more likely to describe single‐parent, same‐sex, or unmarried couples as ‘proper’ families. 57% of people no longer believe that a couple with children needs to be married to be a family. 77% of people believe that single parents can be a 'proper' family and 59% believe that same sex couples can be a family.

The public doesn’t just disagree with the Government's image of a family. People feel alienated by the emphasis put on a ‘traditional’ model of family life. 22% don’t believe their family is valued by society and 18% feel judged because of their family set‐up while 52% claim the Government does not take their family set‐up into account. It should also be borne in mind that whatever high ideals are promoted, not everyone gets to choose their circumstances, especially when times are hard.

NSS President Terry Sanderson said in The Telegraph: "For children brought up by unmarried parents or single parents being told that marriage is the only valid family arrangement will be totally contradictory to everything they know about the world. It is telling our children that their own family structure is somehow inferior."

However, both the Government and ‘traditionalist’ religious groups are very good at ignoring data that don’t suit their agenda and carrying on regardless. No matter how many statistics are thrown at them, it's water off a self-righteous duck's back. Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith recently called on the Government to preserve the traditional family as 'the most vital part of society'. He made a clear distinction between marriage and cohabiting, claiming the 'relationships are not the same - and there are consequences for us all'.*

When did these ideal families exist apart from in a pack of Happy Families cards? Certainly not within living memory of many MPs, including David Cameron. According to the Office of National Statistics, in 1961 only 38% of families consisted of a married couple with two or more children.** That was before the swinging Sixties kicked in, before the Pill was widely available, before the Women's Movement gained momentum and before homosexuality was made legal. These are all things blamed for destroying the ideal family.

Just in passing - how many Tory MPs have had affairs or got divorced? The unscientific answer is - too many for them to be preaching at the rest of us. This is 'don't do as we do, do as we say' politics. Or maybe I just think that because I'm not married.


* Speech at the Janet Young Memorial Lecture 4 November 2011

** ONS Social Trends 40 (2010 edition) p 14.

Have A Nice Day

People often complain about being 'ordered' to have a nice day by shop assistants or coffee shop workers or pretty much anyone American.

I'm no grammar nazi but here's the thing. 'Have a nice day' is not an imperative, an order. It's a subjunctive, expressing a hope or wish (it also has other uses).

Other examples of this use of the subjunctive are:

Get well soon
Long Live the King
Live long and prosper
Goodbye (god be with ye)
Farewell
Hallowed be thy name
(Have a) Happy Birthday
(Have a) Happy Christmas
The old English 'Wassail', a contraction of 'Waes Hail' means 'be healthy', a kind of early version of 'have a nice day'. If/when the NHS falls apart we might want to revive it.

It's harder to spot a subjunctive in English because there is no special verb form to indicate it as there is in other languages. In French, for example, 'hallowed be thy name' is 'que ton nom soit sanctifié' and the soit gives it away.

This may not make it any less annoying the next time someone says 'have a nice day' and you know they don't give a toss but at least now you can be annoyed for the right reasons.

Save Our Souls - on the NHS

Should the National Health Service be tending to our spiritual health and if so, how far should it go?

This week, during a debate about an amendment to the Health and Social Care Bill, tabled by psychiatrist and crossbench peer Baroness Hollins, the Archbishop of York called for the words ‘spiritual health’ to be inserted into a clause about the duty of the secretary of state, the NHS Commissioning Board and clinical commissioning groups to improve the quality of services.

Spirituality is already covered in healthcare guidelines even though there is no evidence-base for it and even though its use is so broad as to be almost meaningless as I wrote about here. For example, going to football matches is considered a spiritual act by some healthcare providers, including the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Guidelines often assume that everyone is spiritual and has spiritual needs that the NHS must cater to. NHS Scotland’s past guidelines stated: ‘We are not human beings seeking spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings seeking what it means to be human’.

The NHS already forks out £29 million a year for hospital chaplains and again there is no evidence that they improve the patient care. In fact, many of the country’s best hospitals spent the lowest proportion of their expenditure on chaplaincy services.

The debate around the amendment wasn't just about some sort of wooly feel-good spirituality. The Archbishop of York’s idea of treating the spirit goes beyond what most people would consider the domain of doctors and nurses. During the debate, Dr John Sentamu told peers: "I am one of those who believe that human beings are psychosomatic spiritual entities."

He then explained how he freed the spirit of a girl who was terrified after seeing a goat sacrificed. Visits from a GP, psychiatrist and psychologist did little to help, he said, but then he said a prayer, anointed the girl and lit a candle on his visit. Shortly after, he received a phone call saying the girl was no longer terrified and was talking again. "That was not mental or physical illness; there was something in her spirit that needed to be set free," he told his peers.

This is a very particular interpretation of the word ‘spiritual’. A spokesman for the Archbishop said the case of the young girl just involved a standard prayer of healing. With candles and anointing to set her spirit free? Although Sentamu did not directly describe his actions as exorcism, they were very close to standard exorcist practice. He is not, by the way, a medical doctor. He is, however, someone who determines the laws and policy of this country along with all the other bishops in the Lords. Even so, as a lawyer he should know that one anecdote does not constitute evidence.

However, his statement isn't that outrageous when you know that the NHS has already been quietly working with exorcists to treat patients for at least 40 years.

Dr Rob Waller, a consultant psychiatrist and an honorary clinical lecturer at the University of Edinburgh was formerly part of a medical support group for the local Catholic exorcist at Bradford District Care Trust. It met monthly to discuss cases and whether they should be dealt with by the church or by a doctor. He said: “There was a similar set-up with local imams, and the Church of Scotland has links with psychiatrists and considers exorcism.” He also said that every consultant psychiatrist will see a “handful of patients” in their career requiring “some kind of deliverance ministry”.

It sounds so much more innocuous when you call it deliverance - although maybe not if you've seen the film of that name.

Professor Robin M. Murray, head of Psychiatric Research at Kings College’s Institute of Psychiatry, who this year was awarded a knighthood for his services to medicine, said: “Not all psychiatric problems respond to conventional treatments. So while I don’t know of any scientific evidence that exorcism works, I would have thought it reasonable for a [hospital] chaplain to carry this out.”

This is a scientist saying that a procedure with no evidence is reasonable.

However, Dr James Woolley, consultant psychiatrist at the Springfield Hospital in southwest London, doesn't believe in demonic possession or exorcism. There are many psychiatric syndromes characterised by a patient believing they are possessed and, for that reason alone, Woolley says, it would be “reckless and unprofessional” to recommend exorcism as an avenue of treatment. “The psychosis could get worse, and being in a highly paranoid state is associated with the risk of harm primarily to yourself and potentially to other people.”

Reckless and unprofessional. There is a possible placebo effect but the ethics of placebos are complex and still need evidence to justify their use.

In the mid-1970s, Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Donald Coggan laid down strict guidelines on exorcisms (deliverance) which were to be carried out only by an appointed diocesan exorcist after consultation with a doctor. The Church of England has 44 exorcists, one for every diocese, appointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Next time Rowan Williams is sounding off in the media, bear in mind that he is in charge of these men. The interview for appointment must be interesting.

There's a story in the Mail today about a nurse who asked Jesus to help when a baby was dying of a heart attack. While this is an extreme case, and she was struck off (and it is the Mail) the dangers of introducing any level of non-evidence-based behaviour into healthcare should not be treated lightly. The current trend for 'holistic' treatment opens the door to worse care, not better. At a time when the NHS is facing severe cuts, surely the most important thing is to treat patients and keep them alive long enough to worry about the state of their souls?