Pagans are allowed to have magic wands in prison: What’s next? Genital mutilation of girls through the NHS?
Most of the times, when you read the news, it seems, as the old cliché has it, that the inmates have taken over the asylum. Whether that is true or not, we now have at least some proof that in Britain the pagans have taken over the prisons:
Hundreds of Pagan worshippers locked up in British jails have been given the right to take twigs into their cells to use as magic wands. The ruling, which also allows hoodless robes and rune stones, was made to ensure the 300 or so Pagans currently serving sentences have the same rights as other religions.
The permission to use the “religious artefacts” was agreed after consultation with the Pagan Federation which advised the prison service on what equipment its members needed. There are estimated to be one million Pagans in Britain – around 300 of whom are in prison.
Pagans in some prison hospitals are allowed to receive visits from celebrants of their faith. Pagan chaplains can offer bedside healing rituals, meditation and special prayers. They may also bring in healing stones and sufferers may be allowed to have small gods and goddesses by their bedsides. However, the Pagans have decided to tone down what are seen as the more exotic and striking forms of their worship and ritual, such as carrying flaming torches.
No demand for flaming torches in their cells? How very moderate and accommodating of them…
Truly though, are these people insane? I don’t mean the pagans. I’m not sure believing what they do is much stranger than believing that grape products made by non-Jews may not be eaten, as people do in Judaism - or that one should at least once in his life travel millions of miles to walk around and kiss some stone, as the Muslims believe. Or that God sent His own son down to earth to be nailed to a tree. Most religions must seem quite ludicrous to those who aren’t of it.
Anyway, the thing is, why should prisons accommodate to any particular belief system at all? Let’s, for the sake of argument, presume that all those in prison actually did do the crimes for which they were sentenced and take things from there. In other words, it’s nobody’s fault but their own that they find themselves in a situation where their freedoms are seriously restricted. Furthermore, I’m pretty sure that whatever crime they committed was also seriously frowned upon by the God of their choice. So, these prisoners may indeed feel the need to do a lot of praying to make amends to their God - but I don’t think it should be part of the prison’s remit to go out of its way to enable them to do it in the style and comfort to which they were used before they chose to commit the crimes which put them there in the first place.
I don’t mean to be a spoilsport and of course I don’t give a damn if those pagans are allowed to gather a few bits of twigs and a handful of pebbles but it’s the whole principle behind it that I find ludicrous and, in all honesty, quite nauseating. This extreme sensitivity when it comes to the private or mass delusions - sorry: religions - of people is a very unhealthy phenomenon. It’s partly informed by the whole Muslim & Christian situation: that, because of 9/11 and the whole Iraq thing, some in our society think it’s better to show them that we respect their faith as much as ours (or any others’.) Which can culminate in absolute lunacy, like when the Archbishop of Canterbury proposed that certain types of Sharia law could be introduced to England.
In a broader sense this kind of inclusiveness can lead to all the nonsense and real dangers that come under the header ‘cultural relativism’. Meaning that you can’t judge anything, because some things are part of another person’s culture and since all cultures are equal… Which means that according to these cultural relativists it would be morally wrong for us (and watch here for the obligatory reference to colonialism) to condemn things like the forced burning of widows, the genital mutilation of girls, the hanging of homosexuals etcetera etcetera.
So, I truly believe one should never try to accommodate to the beliefs and cultural practices of the whole bloody world. Bending over backwards to keep a handful of pagans happy with some twigs and pebbles is indeed not such a big deal but it’s part of a collective mindset that can all too easily lead to a situation where we are quite happy to allow certain insane imams in mosques to proclaim that all homosexuals should be thrown from high buildings and that suicide bombers are martyrs - or that we shouldn’t try to impose our laws on those immigrants who mutilate their young daughters’ genitalia.
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