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Britain's First Jedi Member of Parliament
earthlingpink writes "In his maiden speech to the House of Commons, the Hon. Member for Copeland, Jamie Reed MP, announced that he is a Jedi: "as the first Jedi Member of this place, I look forward to the protection under the law that will be provided to me by the Bill" (the quotation is a fair way down the page; search for 'Jedi,' not surprisingly). How long before we have a Congressional equivalent?" Update: 06/29 23:15 GMT by T : Reader JE_Hoover adds a correction: "Although the previous MP for Copeland was the Hon. Member for Copeland, the current MP for Copeland is not a member of the privy council. Debretts make it all clear."
This whole Jedi religion dreck has now officially gone too far. To those misguided simpletons out there who insist on calling themselves 'Jedi knights', I offer you this chance to prove yourselves:
What's that...you can't? Don't have suitable raw materials, you say?
OK...that's fair...how about this, then:
Are you doing it? I'm not feeling anything...
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Am I the only person who doesn't see the Jedi belief system flawed? I could only imagine the devestation to the republic if this became popular.
Peace out, homies.
This is not the article you are looking for.
Not every argument requires reduction to absurdity.
How long before we have a Congressional equivalent?
Oh, but we have. Problem is... they're all Siths. And the greedy kind.
"How long before we have a Congressional equivalent?"
They get Jedi, we get Sith...
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
As if there wasn't enough lunacy in Parliament.
Finding God in a Dog
I'm glad that he's paying attention to this ridiculous bill by showing how daft the implications of it would be. Hopefully, along with Rowan Atkinson's recent attack, the bill will be defeated
I'm not stressed. I'm just terribly, terribly alert.
Or maybe Count Obama?
Somehow "Master Kennedy" just doesn't have the same ring to it. And "Darth Delay" is only slightly better than "General Grievous"
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
At first I thought it was ridiculous to openly espouse a hokey religion invented by a science fiction hack. But then I realized, it sure helped this guy ...
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Here is Jamie Reed's MP page on My Society's excellent TheyWorkForYou project.
And here is the screen scraped debate, that you can comment on like a blog.
You cant make anything foolproof, they'll only invent better fools.
This is an absolute insult to those of us who hold religious beliefs. Now the faiths of Christianity, Judaism and Muslimism are on par with something made up in a movie!
If you read some of the rest of the debate --- surprisingly good stuff, provided you skim it and don't get bogged down in the interminable speeches --- you'll realise that the statement was in the context of a debate on the Racial And Religious Hatred Bill, now undergoing reading for the second time. I'm not entirely sure why the hon. Gentleman saw fit to follow it up with a rather long lecture on Cumbrian history, that was only brought short by his running out of time and the Speaker cutting him off...
Not really.
It's entirely different to claim to believe in Jedi and to claim to BE a Jedi. According to the books I've read and the movies, a Jedi is capable of performing these actions. They all have their "talents" but to be a Jedi you have to be able to manipulate the force in some tangible and demonstrable way.
The water to wine thing doesn't hold. It's not a commonly held dogma (leaving backwoods ministers from crazyville out) that Christians are given controllable powers. If they were claiming to be Jesus, on the other hand, by all means, ask for proof. Thomas did, and got to stick his fingers through the nail wounds.
Never confuse volume with power.
Sounds to me as if he went straight over your head. He is opposing a bill that would outlaw the the stirring up of hatred against members of a religion. That includes jedi, sith, scientologist, whatever. The bill is very loosely worded as to what could be considered stirring up hatred. "Yoda was an arsehole, it all Jedi should be done away with" might qualify.
So this is a smart guy using satire to ridicule the bill in a fairly subtle way. So yes, I suppose you could say that it does give insight into the type of people who get voted in.
And in case anyone is wondering about the obsequious thanks to Jack Cunningham in the speech, it is traditional to thank your predecessor in your first speech to the commons.
We'll have a Jedi Senator years before we'll have an atheist one.
Fish-out-of-thin-air guy wasn't a Christian. He was a Jew.
Ok, this one isn't quite as simple or as amusing as the summary makes out, I'm afraid.
One of the live issues here in the UK at the moment is the "Incitement to Religious Hatred" bill that Blair is currently pushing through Parliament. This is broadly similar to the existing laws on "Incitement to Racial Hatred". The difference is that, under current laws, only Jews and Sikhs are protected, according to some interpretations. Christianity is protected separately, under some rarely (read "not in my lifetime") enforced blasphemy laws. Muslims, on the other hand, are not technically recognised as a racial group, so you can argue that they're not protected. This, the Blairites say, means that people can hurl racial abuse at Muslims with impunity. This is obviously bollocks, of course, since this would count as racial hatred anyway, so all the situation really needs is for existing laws to be enforced...
Now, the reason why this is being pushed through is that the Labour party has taken a lot of flak over Iraq from the UK's Islamic community, which is normally a staunch supporter of Labour. Indeed, a deeply unpleasant specimen by the name of George Galloway (he of "Sir I Salute Your Indefatigability" fame) managed to beat a sitting Labour MP in a normally safe seat at the last general election, standing on an extremist anti-war, anti-establishment platform (which is a little ironic considering his own lifestyle). Therefore, Labour introduces this bill in an effort to get the UK Islamic community behind them again.
Now, this leads to two problems. First of all, a lot of people, particularly commedians, notice that this has serious implications for freedom of speech. One can no longer ridicule a religion or its texts and be sure of being on safe legal ground. Now, Blair's response to this was to say that the letter of the law would not be enforced. This is obviously a pretty pathetic argument and kind of missing the whole point of "the law" (that it lets people know whether they are behaving legally or not). It also leaves the door open to all kinds of future abuses.
The other problem is that if Blair honestly doesn't intend to see the law enforced, then he's creating a lot of false expectations among the UK Islamic community and other particularly devout religious groups. A lot of these people are expecting that, come the enactment of this, it will be illegal to say anything critical of their religion or to call any aspect of it into question. If this doesn't happen, there could be a lot of disappointment, some of it violent.
So all in all, this story is a little more serious than it first seems.
...you're doing waving your hand around like that?
I'm a Congressman. Mind tricks don't work on me. Only money.
More people need to RTFA. No, I'm not new here, but still. Usually, people manage to get it somewhere on topic. This discussion is just completely out there.
This member of Parliament isn't really proclaiming himself as a Jedi or anything of the sort. He's trying to make the consequences of potential legislation easier to understand.
Basically, they're working on a bill which would make stirring up hated against members of a religion, illegal. But the bill is total crap, so much so to the point where it would make any and all religions virtually immune to criticism.
Those of us who live in America, and are into the topic of religion, namely online discussion on forums and the like (so that's why this is on Slashdot!), often enjoy a high amount of freedom in questioning the legitimacy of Jesus, or the Muslim world's seemingly-manic obsession with demonizing Christianity, or anything else which might brand you as a heretic in that religion's home-base.
If this bill were passed, any who enjoy that right and excercise it in public would potentially be committing an illegal act.
Of course, in the Western world the Internet is still largely a frontier for government monitoring and regulation. It's too dynamic. In public, however, there's little doubt that any statement or action which might even remotely irritate a member of a certain religion (double points if it's a minority) would be regarded as hate-inciting and therefore illegal.
The bottom line is, there goes another freedom! Unless this bill is stopped.
"She turned me into a newt!" heads turn "I got better."
If you can actually prove that your hand was miracuously healed, then I'm pretty sure James Randi has a million bucks waiting for you.
But it raises a pretty big question. If Jesus did heal your wounded hand, why doesn't he heal other believers' hands? I'll wager that most burn wards in the Americas and Western Europe are populated largely by Christians, so what makes you so damn special, or is there some sort of miracle lottery?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
If they were claiming to be Jesus, on the other hand, by all means, ask for proof. Thomas did, and got to stick his fingers through the nail wounds.
Thomas did ask for proof, yes, and he got his proof. But Jesus castigated also him for it. Daring to ask for proof was seen as a much weaker for of faith than belief without seeing.
Such a philosophy goes a long way towards explaining the current climate in the US.
Download my free songs!
L Ron Hubbard didn't wait thousands of years to start his psycho religion, and now that religion has half the fucktards in Hollywood dumping their money into it. With such a proven track record, why should the Jedi nerds wait thousands of years to start theirs?
I hope you will next time. We need people like this to stand up against any trend towards religiousity becoming part of government (as distinct from part of state) in the UK. For the many people who consider religion to be no more than fiction or, at best, mythology, those who will mock its place in parliament are to be encouraged and voted for. A
Time is life: speed saves it. LJK Setright
Please show me where it says in the bible that God caused life to appear out of nowhere. Please show me where the bible references TIME at all after those first seven days, when God was creating humans, plants, and animals. There is no indication whatsoever that God snapped his fingers and life suddenly appeared. By believing in this man-invented concept of creationism, you are claiming to understand how your god did these things and how long it took him.
Your catagorical disbelief of evolution (as opposed to specific objections, like irregularities in the evidence) is not supported by the world around us, and it is not supported by the very book you claim to follow. It is illogical, irrational, extremely arrogant, and is modded flamebait for very good reason.
As for the "it's just a theory" horseshit, well, if you haven't figured out how worthless that statement is by now, you really are beyond all reason. Things like eletricity and gravity and relativity and nuclear fission and nuclear fusion are all theories, and have all field very real, practical results. Evolution, too, has shown itself to be real as best it can, but no one can prove it to be absolutely, unquestionably true any more than they could prove that an electrons are real by picking one up and showing it to me.
But you go ahead and keep believing that electrons aren't real because you can't observe them directly. Just try not to get hit by a bolt of lightning...
Look, I'm sorry if I offend anyone, but I'm really getting tired of the logic here: I don't understand it, so I will attribute it to God.
If you don't know how something happened, why is a common course of action to give credit to a god for something good happening, when it would be far easier and simpler to just admit you don't know.
I mean, really.... you don't hear many cancer victims blaming Satan for their illness, so why the other way around?
There are further problems with claims such as you state can happen. The biggest that comes to mind is that you are very careful to use sufficiently ambiguous language so that any demand for emperical testing of a miracle can be headed off. Whatever the cause of an alleged miracle, there is going to be a physical manifestation, and that manifestation ought to be measurable, but you put so much wiggle room in, and it almost seems the reason is to stave off that sort of analysis.
The second has to do with the notion of faith itself. Christians aren't the only people who claim miracles. Many adherents of other faiths also claim that their deities (or other spirits and the like) can also produce supernatural feats. Is it your view that God gives non-Christians a helping hand to, or are the only legitimate miracles those that occur to Christians?
It isn't so much that some people discount claims, but rather that in analyzing any claim, the measure ought to be how extraordinary from every day physical interactions the claim is. If you have an extraordinary claim, then you ought to be prepared to provide extraordinary evidence. No claim, not even one made by scientists, ought to be immune from this. Now, in some cases, an extraordinary claim does have extraordinary evidence, in which case skepticism must be put aside, even if only on the basis of current evidence (with the realization that further evidence may change the situation substantially).
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.