I posted:

So when a Christian taunts a scientist about knowing his liturgy, I find it as sad as I suspect a believer might find an atheist like me demanding evidence before faith.

But what I also believe is that the fact that people can self-identify (ie: “profess belief”) and thereby obtain influence and seniority in an organisation, and for that seniority be appointed to political function in the United Kingdom to be slightly askew – but then that’s the House of Lords overall for you.

That folk can pull off this trick at all, however, makes me wonder what separates Christians from Freemasons in this regard?

And Byrne tweeted:

@AlecMuffett FYI: guardian.co.uk/science/blog – Peter McGrath has made comments along similar lines to you regarding @Giles_Fraser on @BBCR4Today

Which does indeed go into the matter in more detail, from the perspective of the director of the HMS Beagle Trust – whom you’d therefore think would be pretty gung-ho about Darwin and science:

Many years ago, when science was in its infancy (1986) I studied the history of the idea of evolution as part of my final year as an indifferent zoology student at Liverpool University. There were some fine budding biologists in that lecture theatre, many of whom had a hinterland of interests, in defiance of the stereotype of scientists.

Which made it all the more telling when our professor, an eminent man from the days when zoology involved fewer genes and bleeping machines, asked how many of us had read On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural etc. etc. etc.

Not one hand of the 30-odd strong honours class went up.

Were it a sacred text, surely we would have been richly indoctrinated in its tenets from an early age. Biology teachers would ask quaking A level students if they had visited their local pigeon fancying club during their free time, and demand that they contemplate an entangled bank.

They don’t, because although it may get an honourable mention in textbooks and lessons, Origin does not represent the state of modern evolutionary biology.

…and (my emphasis)…

Sacred texts tend not to be superseded. Origin, for all the affection it commands among scientisis, has been, time and again as the evidence in support of evolution mounts.

And the authors of sacred texts tend not have doubts about their work. Darwin did.

All scientists do. That is why science works. Origin is not a sacred work, but the antipathy shown to it by some might have something to do with the wounds it inflicted on a whole herd of sacred cows.

So Giles Fraser was pulling a cheap stunt, but you have to think about it to understand why… which is the point really.

And thusly the inimitable Simon Waters answered my question regards what distinguishes the untowardly influential Bishops in the House of Lords from (say) Freemasons that latterly were supposed unelected to pervade seats of power:

Freemasons are expected to believe in god, where as it seems it is optional for census Christians 🙂