What do you think?
Should second homes pay a lot more council tax? Join the debate by emailing letters@westerndailypress.co.uk and including your name and address
and perhaps inflicting more work onto the wonderful NHS. It appears that you value your choice above the health and lives of others.
If you are truly worried about your erosion of freedom, as you claim, and wish to have your right to choose enshrined in law, I hope that the same law gives the NHS the right not to treat you for what could be argued as a self-inflicted infection.
In my opinion, vaccinations should be a legal requirement and anyone not taking the vaccine should be encouraged to take out health insurance, therefore taking some of the burden off the NHS.
Dave Chafer Yeovil, Somerset minister, NO unregulated moneybased parliamentary lobbying, NO bishops in the Upper House, NO primary schools run as ‘church’ schools (still over 50% ), NO private schools and religious foundations exempt from tax, NO regular BBC broadcasting time given to Anglican church, etc.
Despite what all this says, religious freedom does not mean special privileges for religious people, nor provision of legal positive discrimination for them. In fact, it should mean that no-one is treated differently because of their religious beliefs, or lack of them, as with humanists and atheists.
Also, the separation of religion and government should be a cornerstone of this freedom, yet the Queen remains ‘defender of the faith’ and the church is not yet ‘disestablished’.
Last month my Humanist movement celebrated ‘religious freedom day’ and last Saturday, Darwin Day, in the fight against extreme ‘evangelical’ Christian nationalism, often witnessed in America, and extreme Muslim fundamentalism, often practised in much of the Islamic world.
In the light of modern science and education refuting nearly all of it, why are we stuck in a hundredsof-years-old time warp regarding ancient scriptural, ‘faith’-based religions? Why is this obvious question rarely debated?
Homo sapiens means ‘wise man’, but with such big numbers of the world’s population still upholding irrational religious ‘faiths’, perhaps Homo religious would fit better. Could our hard refusal to leave these beliefs, in human supremacy and godlike everlasting life, be the delusionary mental state which stops us from surviving the current ‘sixth extinction’ from pandemic, climate and environmental emergencies?
Alan Debenham Taunton, Somerset