Last Nights Seminar

Last night I went to a seminar by Share Jesus International on the Incitement to Religious Hatred Bill.

I have to say I was disappointed. The flyer implied that the seminar would focus in an unbiased way on legal changes that were going to affect us as faith communities and churches, with a focus on the incitement to religious hatred bill. What we actually got was a very conservative take (in some places a rant) on how political correctness took away our freedom of speech. Civil Partnerships, the Gender Recognition Act, and Abortion Laws all came in from very conservative criticism along side the Religious Hatred Legislation, as all these things had opportunity to make it illegal to practice our faith. And it certainly wasn't biased. In the debate at the end I pointed out that natural law (which we had been encouraged to use as it is inline with scripture) was not cross cultural or stable, and the speaker backtracked, saying that 'we stand on scripture'. My next point was going to be that he is only taking a very one sided conservative translation of scripture and did not reflect all of Christianity, but at that point the debate was 'moved on' although he did offer to speak with me in private afterwards! Maybe he was wise, as I was going to point out that there was a liberal approach to scripture as well as his own and I'm not sure that is what he wanted to hear. I didn't have a problem with the conservative nature of the speakers, they're entitled to their opinions. I did however have a problem, given that it was billed as a 'balanced view with an opportunity to challenge the panel' with being silenced when I presented a more liberal approach to the issue.

As for information about the religious hatred legislation, we got little, so I'll default to my own research.