Mildly ironically, in a week in which the BBC stands accused of doing some serious blagging, there is a discussion forum on the BBC website about Ethics and freethought. OK, ethics= a Good Thing; freethought = a Good Thing. But, how will they fare under a combined onslaught from possibly the madder reaches of the commenting community? (The sort of people who populate some of the BBC comments pages)

Picking a few topics at random:

The latest discussion is called BULLMUCK and has some posts on the Hindu holy bull, Shambo, which is about to face being killed as a supposed TB danger. (Welcome to the badgers’ world.)

This is one point of view:

… its religion that is exploiting them, forcing these unfortunate creatures like we do pets into accepting our unwanted adoration and worship….

Now, I must say that unwanted adoration and/or worship are rarely forced on animals, but it made me think. Is worshipping some entity cruel to it? In fact, it seems that quite a few commenters see forcing worship on creatures as inhumane. Maybe, if there were a God, it would piss him/her/it off as well. So let’s all do the decent thing and stop doing it.

Next thread :MILK THE CRUEL DRINK? There are loads of vegan comments posters. Yes they have a point about cruelty being involved in milk production, but there are also enough people trying to claim that milk products are poisonous to humans, which strikes me as being on a very slim science basis.

In any case (and I’m a vegetarian), I’m starting to panic at the extremely strong animal-orientation of freethinking ethicists. Ethics should be mainly about humans, surely? No, it’s a statistical blip. There’s only one more purely animal-oriented thread on the page and I’m going to skip it.

Oh dear, though, the CONCLUSION TO EVOLUTION thread already smells of some Intelligent Design stuff. Lo and behold, it starts from this post:

Is the only logical conclusion to Evolution an ultimate “being” that knows everything & is able to Create everything?

You would think a simple no would suffice.
Indeed, that’s exactly what the next post says:

No.
Hope this helps,

Another post says

For the sake of entertainment, perhaps you could explain just what you think evolution is and how you think it works

I’m starting to warm to this page, now. To save me copying and pasting edited highlights here, if you are slightly interested, look at it yourself.