It is important to establish here at the beginning that, with regard to the definitions in the ‘Racial & Religious Hatred Act 2006’, neither the ‘Notori’ web site, ‘Just Suppose’ power point presentation, static protests by Notori nor the book ‘Astonishing Credulity’ display any “threatening words”, or display “hatred” against “Christians” or any other religious group at the person level, nor is it the intention of the three publications and the static protests to do so; but rather they stringently voice ‘concern’ about one of organised Christianity’s long standing, established activities: being the preaching of the fictional Christian theology to children, principally via a compulsory ‘act of collective worship’ in the school assembly, and generally through the school curriculum with ‘religious education’ lessons, which are, in certain establishments, presented as factually based. 

Nor do ‘Notori’, ‘Just Suppose’ and ‘Astonishing Credulity’ cajole people to “hate Christians” or any other religious group, but more invite people to criticise, and openly question, organised Christianity’s legal right to have the preaching of a fiction as factually based to young children via the school assembly as a compulsory ‘act of worship’. 

To date, criticising the tenets of religion, and the conduct of organised religion in the proselytising of its beliefs, as far as I am aware, has not been made a criminal, or civil, offence. Nor are our police employed to be at the personal behest of religious citizens to ensure that they do not become exposed to, what they personally perceive as, material offense toward their beliefs; any more than the police would expend police hours making sure Arsenal supporters do not ‘see’ or ‘hear’ material offence against the performance of the Arsenal football team that they hold in such high esteem!  

The religious faithful might also be offended by their ‘faith’ being compared with the following of a football team, and see the two concepts as completely incomparable due to the ‘divine’ nature of one and the earthly nature of the other. But this golf only exists in the mind set of people so disposed to create such a fictional distinction. To a rationally minded thinker, no such difference exists, because the ‘divine’ is a man made intangible concept with absolutely no substance whatsoever. Football supporters are a group of people with a mutual interest in common, as are church goers! 

The content on the website ‘Notori’, and in the book ‘Astonishing Credulity’, pursues the issue of the religious indoctrination of children, and asks people to question the validity of the claims made by organised religions and their tenets. The website and the book are not anti ‘religion’; they are anti ‘religious indoctrination of children’, and anti ‘special privilege’ for organised religion; the rational for this position rests on the basis of the demonstrably fictitious nature of all of the tenets of all religions. 

What does NOTORI aim to achieve? 

Through NOTORI, I aim to make the public aware, by any legal means which proves effective, of the possible issues attached to the concept of allowing the Church as an organisation to slowly regain its pre-Victorian position of authority in society, and the fact that this concept is actually progressing today at a slow indiscernible rate; so that, the public can openly debate the issue and make the government aware, on mass hopefully, of any concerns it might have in this area.  

There is a concern that, if a perceived return of privilege, and ultimately power, to the Church as a standard setting and law making body, is not checked by public opposition before it progresses past the point of no return, we will all find ourselves once again being ruled by religious dogmatic tenets and irrational beliefs and customs. 

The only criteria required in order for this concern to reach maturity would be to fill 51% of the seats in parliament with staunchly religious MPs. This would not be representative of the religious/non religious mix of the population, but it would be a very easy criterion for the party leaders to fulfil simply by selecting, for representation in all areas, only Christian members of their respective parties. If all of the options on a ballot paper for all parties, in any given area, are practicing Christians, that area, and parliamentary seat, will return a Christian MP; and we must bear in mind: All 60 million of us are governed by what the meagre handful of MP’s in parliament decree; and this is the case whether the make up of the MPs in the House of Commons reflects public opinion and belief, or not! 

Concerns over Church privilege and power cover the following areas: 

• The Church’s current levels of involvement in affairs of state.
• The current levels of government sanctioned special privileges for religious groups.
• Organised religions impact in government policy, and the formation of statute law.
• The current levels of tax exemptions for religious groups.
• The eye-watering levels of wealth within organised religion (£ Billions).
• The issue of compulsory collective religious worship in our schools.
• The inclusion of fictional theology in the school curriculum.
• The teaching of Creationism and Intelligent Design as factually based.
• The absence of Evolution in the science curriculum in many schools.
• The state sanction of ‘non parental’ institutional religious indoctrination of children in the UK.
• Religious culture’s ability to trump British law.

Justification for the measures taken: (This web site, leaflet delivery and static public demonstrations)

Faith Schools are set to increase in number with government sanction, and support, involving financial and legal help; and the government do not even know exactly how many people in the UK are Christian, or any other religious denomination in the religious sense of the word, rather than the historic cultural sense. It could be that the vast majority of the UK simply is not religious! However, the mix of the secular/theist population does not form the main basis of Notori’s aims; these are based solely on the fact that all religion is fiction, and should not therefore be presented as fact to children in schools. Lying to children is lying to children, regardless of how many adults wish to believe the lies to be factually based, how large such a following has grown to, how much wealth it controls or how long it has existed! 

We also know that any ‘legally acceptable’ form of protest from the public against government policies is generally totally pointless and ineffective; but to stay within the law, they are the only forms of protest we have. Our past governments have more than adequately demonstrated that public opinion against their policies is viewed with total arrogant contempt, and as worthless and irrelevant, and simply not worth being concerned about! Our past and present holders of cabinet office tend to hold their own decisions on policy to be absolutely correct by default and beyond any form of question or challenge from the electorate; the expenses fiasco more than sufficiently demonstrated the breath taking arrogance of the core of our MPs. 

However, be that as it may, the concept of faith schools is totally flawed from a social cohesion perspective and increasing the number of faith schools will develop, in the decades to come, into a segregated Britain; a Britain full of silo religious communities that do not trust each other, and cannot live in harmony with each other. We have over 2,000 years of history, riddled with religious and cultural conflict, at our disposal with which to prove this argument. It is without doubt true that: if we take a medium sized, mixed cultural community, and place a Christian faith school as the only school in the west side of that community, and an Islamic faith school as the only school in the east side, within a few decades the families in the community would move home to be in the area of the school of choice and create an east/west split in the town. This would be a European/African Christian/non religious east side and an Asian/African Islamic and Asian non religious west side. We do not need to set up this experiment to test the theory, areas like Bradford in the UK have already undergone such a population separation phenomenon and achieved this result even without the aid of faith schools with which to kick start or accelerate the process. 

Under a system which increases the amount of faith schools, the indoctrination of children into religious tenets will grow to a level far greater than that of today, and become more virulent and effective; the levels and intensity today are already unacceptable and worrying. In the future, religious groups will compete to out- fanaticise each other in the manner in which they indoctrinate their respective children. This will grow over the decades and fuel the concept of creating the religiously segregated society alluded to in the paragraph above. If we do not believe that a Christian organisation would consider competing with Islam in order to out fanaticise its children, we need to view with interest the documentary called ‘Jesus Camp’ from evangelical America. 

Issues like these are always a very slow indiscernible creep towards the inevitable end. History demonstrates time and again that societies always fail to tackle such concerns until they have become too embedded to reverse; parliament passing laws to stem the questioning of such issues perversely assists this concept of sleepwalking our country into social disaster.  

When issues like this arise, verbal and written protest to one’s MP are futile unless they arrive in overwhelming numbers, due to the general arrogance of government, and government’s inability to listen to anything which questions its policies. Only opening the public’s eyes to the problem, by what ever legal means proves effective, can place pressure on a government to rethink their policies and strategies. 

This does assume that the public would agree with the concerns above, once they have been made aware of the deeper, underlying issues at hand, and would move en-bloc to protest the government on such issues. However, it might also be the case that the public do not actually perceive the issues to be a problem, and do not protest the government; but to find out, you first have to test the water, and make the public aware. 

Hence Martin Luther nailing his ninety-five theses to the door of All Saints' Church in Wittenberg on 31 October 1517 to protest the wealth of the Catholic Church and the idea of the Catholic Church raising money by selling indulgencies to excuse personal sin; an act which sparked the Protestant Reformation and the break from Rome as the seat of religious power in the Christian world. 

Maybe, just maybe: my website, presentation, public static demonstrations and book will be a 21^st century style nailing of a protest on the doors of Westminster and Lambeth Palace, and spark a national protest which sees the end of the faith school expansion program and the end of compulsory acts of collective worship in our schools.  

Please do participate in a national protest, if you agree with the concerns raised on this site, and feel free to contact NOTORI with your comments either by the 'Contact NOTORI' email button, or the 'Read / add comments' button.

Michael Lawrence

Actively campaigning against the religious indoctrination of children.