Prayers (Pray for the Island)

[A fool and his money.....]

Spewin Juan on the radio this morning going on about this as a modernisation of Tynwald to better reflect the society it represents. I think he's right and have no problem with the move.

I do think it's strange though that the members who have expressed a lack of comfort with the prayers and a wish to modernise Tynwald have, without any apparent irony, done so within months of pledging alegence to an hereditary Queen in a faraway land who lives in an 18th century palace with servants and horse guards and who has no democratic mandate on the IoM or anywhere else.

It's not as if the prayers require them to ask for God's permission to enact any law they have decided on is it? 

If they want to modernise Tynwald and make it more reflective of the society it represents, then I'm right behind them. I don't think putting the elephant in the room that is meaningful and overdue constitutional reform in the too hard pile while fannying about with an unimportant issue that results in zero benefit to the people they represent is the best way to go about it.

[Amadeus]

Good. Get rid of the prayers. We're not in the middle ages anymore where the church mattered.  

[Stu Peters]

5 minutes ago, A fool and his money..... said:

Spewin Juan on the radio this morning going on about this as a modernisation of Tynwald to better reflect the society it represents. I think he's right and have no problem with the move.

I do think it's strange though that the members who have expressed a lack of comfort with the prayers and a wish to modernise Tynwald have, without any apparent irony, done so within months of pledging alegence to an hereditary Queen in a faraway land who lives in an 18th century palace with servants and horse guards and who has no democratic mandate on the IoM or anywhere else.

It's not as if the prayers require them to ask for God's permission to enact any law they have decided on is it? 

If they want to modernise Tynwald and make it more reflective of the society it represents, then I'm right behind them. I don't think putting the elephant in the room that is meaningful and overdue constitutional reform in the too hard pile while fannying about with an unimportant issue that results in zero benefit to the people they represent is the best way to go about it.

Poco a poco. I was uncomfortable pledging allegiance to Mrs Windsor, but you can't do the job you've been elected to do without crossing your fingers and getting on with it. To Roger's point, no, you can't slide in late or I would.

[paswt]

Someone on the Moaning Line claimed that 54% of those who responded to the census claimed to be "christian" and 47% claimed to have no religion .

Just saying  

[Declan]

2 minutes ago, paswt said:

Someone on the Moaning Line claimed that 54% of those who responded to the census claimed to be "christian" and 47% claimed to have no religion .

Just saying  

Well ...

Christianity  No religion   Islam         Buddhism Hinduism  Judaism

54.7%           43.8%          0.5%            0.5%           0.4%         0.2%

But that's not a referendum on whether there should be a separation of church and state. And it's possible that some of Methodist, Catholic, Happy Clappy Christians on the Island may not support a Church of England ceremony. 

[A fool and his money.....]

7 minutes ago, Stu Peters said:

Poco a poco. I was uncomfortable pledging allegiance to Mrs Windsor, but you can't do the job you've been elected to do without crossing your fingers and getting on with it.

So why aren't you proposing a change to that rather than the minutiae of whether you have to sit around while other people pray for 5 mins? 

[Omobono]

51 minutes ago, Max Power said:

I'm not religious at all but the prayers reinforce a moral obligation to do what is right, maybe they could be replaced with a reminder of the obligations which the house has to the electorate?

If they abandon prayers  in Keys and Tynwald  then why have a church service at St Johns   why even have a ceremony on the 5 July ?   we do it to reinforce the Islands unique  heritage that it linked  over the centuries  to the Church and our christian beliefs and the observance   of the 10 commandments   that every christian  tries to adhere to , What next  no swearing oaths  or promises to tell the truth    in court  or before a judge ,  

with the current Woke culture in Tynwald led by Daffy  and backed up by the loony left influence ,  we are embarking  on another Tynwald management committee embarrassment , the recent Census figures showed there was a clear majority of those living on the island who considered  themselves as having christian  beliefs  you have to ask the question  to what standards do some of these politicians aspire to when several of them have their address and contact details  as care of the Tynwald office  and entries  contained in the   the register  members interest  particularly regarding pecuniary matters  is very scant , or non existent ,

this is what this Tynwald management committee should be looking at not weather prayers  are old fashioned or not ,!

 

 

 

[Declan]

6 minutes ago, A fool and his money..... said:

So why aren't you proposing a change to that rather than the minutiae of whether you have to sit around while other people pray for 5 mins? 

Reform of Tynwald is glacial. We need to take every inch we gain until the reactionaries wake up and find themselves in a new world. 

Edited February 3, 2022 by Declan

[HeliX]

9 minutes ago, Omobono said:

If they abandon prayers  in Keys and Tynwald  then why have a church service at St Johns   why even have a ceremony on the 5 July ?   we do it to reinforce the Islands unique  heritage that it linked  over the centuries  to the Church and our christian beliefs and the observance   of the 10 commandments   that every christian  tries to adhere to , What next  no swearing oaths  or promises to tell the truth    in court  or before a judge ,  

with the current Woke culture in Tynwald led by Daffy  and backed up by the loony left influence ,  we are embarking  on another Tynwald management committee embarrassment , the recent Census figures showed there was a clear majority of those living on the island who considered  themselves as having christian  beliefs  you have to ask the question  to what standards do some of these politicians aspire to when several of them have their address and contact details  as care of the Tynwald office  and entries  contained in the   the register  members interest  particularly regarding pecuniary matters  is very scant , or non existent ,

this is what this Tynwald management committee should be looking at not weather prayers  are old fashioned or not ,!

 

 

 

"woke" isn't synonymous with "anything I don't like".

[Roger Mexico]

18 minutes ago, Stu Peters said:

To Roger's point, no, you can't slide in late or I would.

Maybe that's the compromise then.  Still have prayers, but the sitting doesn't formally start till afterwards and members can slip in for the start of that if they don't want to assent to prayers.

[A fool and his money.....]

1 minute ago, Declan said:

Reform of Tynwald is glacial. We need to take every inch we gain until the reactionaries wake up and find themselves.

I don't agree. Where there's a will there's a way. Pledging allegiance to the Queen and sending legislation off for royal assent is a fundamental affront to democracy on the island and makes a mockery of the democratic will of the people of the island and has done for decades if not centuries. 

Having to sit quietly while other people for pray for 5 minutes once a month is at worst a minor inconvenience for the people that have to do it and are uncomfortable with, but has no impact whatsoever on the people they have been elected to represent.

I'm not against them scrapping the prayers, far from it. I just think that if you want to modernise Tynwald and make it more reflective of the society it represents then there are far more productive and logical places to start - even if it does require a bit of effort.

[HeliX]

(From: https://www.gov.im/media/1375604/2021-01-27-census-report-part-i-final-2.pdf)

[Kopek]

I think we need a stronger synonym than 'Glacial' to describe the reform of Tynwald?

A lot of the reform needed is of the backroom procedures but the prayers, along with Mr Speaker and the Honourable Member are frontage that the public can see as traditions that we can do without. The deeper reforms would be of little interest to our apathetic public?

[Kopek]

The religions refereed to are those that the person identifies with rather than an indication of their 'Faith' in it. The church attendance figures show a different attitude.

Surprisingly, the religions that we might expect to be more 'faithful', perhaps Islam and Judaism,, are no more so than the Christian adherents.

Edited February 3, 2022 by Kopek

[Roger Mexico]

1 hour ago, Declan said:

Well ...

Christianity  No religion   Islam         Buddhism Hinduism  Judaism

54.7%           43.8%          0.5%            0.5%           0.4%         0.2%

 

Religion was an optional question in the so a truer breakdown would be:

Buddism	390	0.5%
Christianity	40725	48.4%
Hinduism	263	0.3%
Islam	393	0.5%
Judaism	113	0.1%
Other	0	0.0%
No religion	32603	38.8%
Did not reply	9582	11.4%
Total	84069	100.0%

That said the zero (ie not a single person) for Other looks dodgy to me.  No Jains or Zoroastrians?  No Pagans or Spiritualists?  No Pastafarians or Jedi Knights?  No Wiccans - a religion that was practically invented in Castletown? 

There's a number of slightly odd things in the Census results that look like processing errors to me

 

Edited to add: In the UK 2011 Census there were about a quarter of a million valid 'Other'  - analysed here in this useful blog post from 2012 - and the number was an increase so you would expect at least a few hundred on the Island.

Edited February 3, 2022 by Roger Mexico