The BCSE's wider membership

(Published: March 2007)

In this article I first provide an index to my other articles on the topic:

• Decline and Fall : Documenting the BCSE's collapsing membership and the deceit involved in its claims to portray itself as growing. See also: "Decline And Fall 2".
• The Website Editors - This article looks at some of the "smaller fish" in the BCSE pond to investigate whether they were real science educators or whether they too, like the leadership, were overwhelmingly campaigning atheists with no standing in the field of science education.
• Index of past and present committee members.

The previous parts of this investigation:

1. Who Are The Members? (Part 1 - in the early days, the BCSE, despite making impressive claims for itself and being willing to make serious allegations about others, were reluctant to reveal the identities of those behind their own claims).
2. Who Are The Members? (Part 2 - in which I exposed the fraudulent method the BCSE used to claim artificially inflated membership numbers for itself).
3. Who Are The Members? Who Are The Members? (Part 3 - in the days before the BCSE had named any of its leadership, I named ten core individuals, documenting their lack of experience in science education, and their credentials as campaigning atheists. When the BCSE eventually named seven leaders, all seven of them turned out to be on the list I had revealed many weeks before).
4. A Note On The BCSE's Membership (Showing the evidence of the BCSE's failure to attract a broader membership).
5. Who Are The Members? - The Website Editors (In which I revealed the identities of the BCSE website editors - all of whom are campaigning atheists).

(Also the series on the BCSE's de facto leader, who turns out to have no credentials or experience either in science or education: Roger Stanyard).

So far, I have provided evidence in four key areas:

1. The "British Centre for Science Education" is not composed of scientists or educators.
2. Its leadership contains no science educators at all, no educators at all, and only one scientist (retired). The evidence showed that 9 of its 10 core members were hardline atheists, many with experience in anti-religious campaigning.
3. This picture is also true amongst its website editors. Five out of five proof-readers are non-science educators who are also campaigning atheists.
4. The BCSE's attempt to persuade real science educators to lend it support has failed. In order to gain any members, the requirement for a monetary donation had to be dropped.

Today I will continue to document details of the BCSE's membership. We have seen that the BCSE does now have a defined membership - even if nothing definite is actually required of its members. Don't expect anything earth-shattering in this article - just the "grunt work" of researching and documenting.

So who cared enough to join? What kind of membership would the BCSE attract? Who will feel drawn to it? Will the country's science educators be forming a queue? Or will it just attract the "usual crowd" of Internet atheists? These are questions which will give us more data - as we seek to document what kind of organisation the BCSE really is.

Gathering The Data

When someone joins the BCSE, they are then marked as a BCSE member in its forums. I think that this is so that forum participants can tell who is who - which is a good thing. Here, for example, is what you see when BCSE website proof-reader John Flemming posts in that forum:

http://community.bcseweb.org.uk/viewtopic.php?p=52#52

So, for this analysis I decided to count the number of posts made by each and every person marked as a "BCSE Member" - and analyse the results.

Once the BCSE members already listed in previous articles are dropped out, the following names are, in order, the ten members who post most in the BCSE forums. As you can see, some of them are not willing to be publicly identified with the BCSE using their full names - I can understand that!

Dave Oldridge, George Jelliss, "wilmot" = Paula Thomas, "jon_12091", James Rocks, Chris Sergeant, "molecanthro" = Mark Whitten, "psiloiordinary" = Mark Edon, "Gwynne", Steve Denton.

Anybody not on this list of ten has averaged less than one message per week to the forum over the past few months.

Here We Go Again...

So. You know where this is going. How many of these individuals will be Bible-believing Christians? None, of course. How many will be atheists? The far greater part.

Remember what the point is here. I'm not saying that no atheist has anything to say about science or education. Neither am I saying that they can't be charming or talented people. I don't believe that for a moment. What I am doing is pointing out that the make-up BCSE's membership is too skewed to be anything like a co-incedence. Like attracts like - and the kind of membership attracted by the BCSE tells us what we need to know. Here, then, they are:

The British Centre for Slandering Evangelicals

One more. Dave Oldridge is a Catholic (not Roman). So he is not an atheist. But the Internet appears to contain gazillions of quotes demonstrating a very deep dislike for evangelical Christianity. So he's very much at home in the BCSE. I won't go into that, as this article is long enough - you can turn up plenty in the BCSE forum along those lines if you want. Oldridge's acceptance by the BCSE does show up the BCSE's hypocrisy: Catholic doctrine is explicitly theocratic - it claims that the church has a head on earth, and that he is the rightful political and temporal ruler of the world. That is of course why the Vatican is a state and has political ambassadors. To those who've followed my series on "Theocracy" and the BCSE's vacuous claims that evangelical Christians are planning to replace democracy, this utter silence on actual theocratic doctrine is another clue. It tells us who and what the BCSE are really opposing.

Conclusion

OK, so that's 8 out of 10 who I was able to identify as being atheists. And generally of the militant variety. Let's throw that into the pot. Of the top ten leaders at launch-time, all the website editors, and the top ten most active members in the forum, there are 20 out of 23 whom I have identified as atheists - and generally of the militant, campaigning variety.

Let's run a similar calculation to one we've run before. The number of atheists in Britian is sometimes estimated at around 10%. Let's be generous, and say 15%. Let's be very generous, and ignore the "militant" factor. Let's do some maths. If you choose 23 people at random, the probability that it just happens that 20 or more would be atheists, is approximately equal to... just under 1 chance in 27 trillion. Or, just under 2 million times less likely than winning the UK's national lottery.

So - is the BCSE's make-up a co-incedence? Is their science really independent of their religion? The answer's not hard to work out...

David Anderson

• See also: The Website Editors - This article looks at some of the "smaller fish" in the BCSE pond to investigate whether they were real science educators or whether they too, like the leadership, were overwhelmingly campaigning atheists with no standing in the field of science education.