‘Thought of the Day’ is a 3 minute slot on Radio 4 during its prime time breakfast show. ‘Pause for Thought’ is the equivalent for Terry Wogan’s Radio 2 show. Both have the sole purpose of allowing people to spout religious propaganda. This cannot be right.
Ok, maybe there’s a time and a place for religion in broadcasting, but why pretend religon has anything to do with “thought”? The very purpose of personal religion is to fill in gaps rather than actually ‘think’ about things; the very purpose of organised religion is to stop people thinking and to get them to obey those in charge or help make them very wealthy.
Free-thinkers don’t have these ancient guidebooks to follow, they, not unreasonably, work things out for themselves by actually thinking.
Logical thinking is not the monopoly of the religious as the highly mis-representative titles of these programme sections seem to indicate. Indeed, as I have indicated, religion is not actually about ‘thought’. However, for reasons best known to the BBC, they refuse to allow those without religion to share their thoughts via these prime time slots.
As free-thinkers see the horrors that religion is behind, and as free-thinkers in the UK are no longer hounded and killed for not having a religious belief, they have tended to be more outspoken and to challenge the accepted norms that religion has thrust upon us all for the centuries it has oppressed us. Quite rightly, they’ve been vociferously saying that these radio ‘thoughts’ should proportionally include the witterings of the non-religious too, or they should be gone.
However, the BBC are having none of that! Despite even John Humphrys coming out against the religious propaganda pieces residing in ‘his’ news show, despite over 1,500 complaints about the daily piece, it has been firmly decided by the Christian controlled BBC trust that only those peddling a religion would be allowed to express their ‘thoughts’. Not only does this discriminate against the growing number of the population who have freed themselves from religious shackles, but it excludes the contributions of some of our greatest philosophers, scientists and thinkers.
Yep. Under this ruling, the BBC would prevent us from hearing from Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, and Stephen Hawking to mention just a few. Surely the ‘thoughts’ of these three alone would be fascinating to listen to? Yet, because none would be referring back to some ancient story and rule book nor trying to sell god-fearing as a good thing, but deliberating on what fresh unbridled unmuted thoughts they’d been having, the BBC would not allow them to speak.
So, under the BBC ruling ‘thought’ remains in the hands of those who actually discourage thinking. Outrageous.
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