Jeremy Hodge

(See the index of past and present committee members, here).

Dr. Jeremy Hodge joined the BCSE committee in late 2007. He has a doctorate from Oxford University in physical chemistry, and runs a professional services firm. He apparently has no qualifications in biological origins or in science education in general - but is, as with the BCSE leadership in general, an outspoken atheist.

In January 2007 I unmasked the fact that some BCSE leaders were publicly lobbying the prime minister to make non-secularist upbringings unlawful - at the same time as the BCSE website proclaimed that their leaders had no atheistic agenda, and that they were committed to democracy and pluralism! (See here). Dr. Hodge did not sign the petition himself, but he did make the argument, in the BCSE's forum, that the "UN Convention on the Rights of the Child" justified such state-enforced atheism.

(http://community.bcseweb.org.uk/viewtopic.php?p=5216#5216)

In the following paragraph, Dr. Hodge shows us that he makes the classic atheist division of religion from science and reason, as if they were mutually exclusive (not to mention some whacky political ideas), and drops in the hallmark of Dawkins-style fundamentalist atheism: the rhetorical linking of Christianity with Islamic terrorism:

I think we may be seeing the early stages of the Second US Civil War here, or at least the breakup of the USA into two groups of states, one which follows reason and science (e.g., California and the North East) and which is the dominant economy, and the other which is religion-dominated (e.g., Mid-West and South). Thinking as a secular European, this may be to our ultimate advantage. I don't particularly care if they delude themselves, or whatever else they do, as long as they don't turn dangerous, as some Islamicists appear to have become, and as long as they don't try to peddle their nonsense over here.

(http://community.bcseweb.org.uk/viewtopic.php?t=1548)

By the time that Dr. Hodge joined the BCSE committee, the BCSE had all but fallen apart, and it seemed to me that there were scarcely more members of the BCSE forum that there were active participants in the BCSE discussion forum. Hence I have not taken time to present much more research in this page on Dr. Hodge's atheism and motivations in being involved in the BCSE.