The BBC’s bi-annual Red Nose Day broadcast, when “doing something funny for money” videos were interspersed with videos about people who need help, in the UK and Africa, included comedian Rowan Atkinson in a dog collar as a faux Archbishop of Canterbury. It’s no longer possible to see Rowan’s video on the Comic Relief website or on You Tube, thanks to 2,000 complaints from people who found it “offensive”. One wonders if those 2,000 people were as irate over the offensive sight of babies in distress in poorly equipped African hospitals, dying from easily preventable diseases like malaria. If not, they should be ashamed of themselves.

Hayley Stevens has written about this on The Heresy Club website (young atheist, skeptic and freethinking bloggers):

Religion should never be exempt from criticism and ridicule, and for as long as the religious think otherwise, the joke is on them.

This was part of Atkinson’s sketch:

Anyway, I hope I’ll be able to talk to you more often like this but for now, from all of us in the good old C of E, have a wonderful night, keep on giving, keep on laughing, keep on praying it doesn’t work, but it’s a good part of a getting-to-sleep routine if you’ve got insomnia.

There are Christians with a sense of humour. They’re more likely to win friends and influence people than those who spend all their time being offended. However, I’ve heard that many young people have been asking how a benevolent god can allow so many babies to die from malaria, which amounts to negative publicity.

Red Nose day has raised over 75 million so far.