The Atheist Blogger

The John Lewis Partnership has a very clear policy on who to not give donations to:

The Partnership does not give money to individuals, religious, ethnic or political groups or third-party fundraising.^[1]

Yet when atheist Richard Green was shopping in the Salisbury branch of a Waitrose store (which is owned by the partnership), he noticed that local charity The Bridge was part of the “green token” scheme, where the customer is given a green token at the checkout to deposit in one of three charity boxes near the exit. At the end of the month, Waitrose donate an amount of money to these three charities based on the percentages of tokens they get.

The description of The Bridge that appeared on the box was as follows.

The Bridge is an organisation working in schools and the community of South Wiltshire. It offers a service to schools in providing lessons, small group work, clubs and help with children experiencing problems. The oasis programme helps those students who are finding it difficult to fit into school life and need a programme and mentoring back into school life.

The Bridge is run by a dedicated team of volunteers and paid staff who are chosen for their commitment and their ability to relate to young people. The Bridge is a registered charity and it takes around £12,000 per month to keep it running.

Unfortunately, this is not the whole truth, as The Bridge is a Christian charity. On their website they list their main aims:

We provide a service to all schools with input of an explicit Christian nature. We want to give students of all ages an opportunity to hear and respond to the Good News of Jesus Christ. Finally we want to follow up the student interest by finding appropriate Church groups and easing the transition into church life.

Of course, none of this was made clear on the donation box, and it is obvious that such a charity shouldn’t be able to even enter the scheme under the current donation policy. Richard Green felt that someone had been dishonest, so he wrote a letter to the manager of the store voicing his concerns. The charity was withdrawn from the scheme immediately.

I contacted The Bridge to get a response statement and received this from Director Andy Lund:

We have been entirely open in our submission to Waitrose and in the very first paragraph of our documentation described ourselves as a Christian Organisation.

It seems the blame lies on both sides. The Bridge seemed to have been dishonest by omitting the word Christian from the paragraphs they submitted for the description. On the other hand, if what Andy Lund says is true and they mentioned that they were a Christian organisation in the first paragraph of their submission, the people at Waitrose are guilty of either not reading the submission properly, or ignoring their own donation policy by allowing this to get further than a simple submission.

This article does not display my current opinions on the subject in hand, and has only been kept up for archive purposes. For my true opinions and explanations, please read this article.

Amongst all the trouble the site suffered during its conception I didn’t think it could get any worse. Power was transferred from the relatively new atheist “Thor” to Brother Richard, an atheist blogger.  Brother Richard asked for volunteers for web design, lawyers, graphic designers, representatives, moderators, and a host of other roles. He also asked for “donators” since the site wasn’t going to pay for itself. I remain slightly skeptical of this part. The site is hosted on Ning.com, a free social networking engine that expects high server usage, so where exactly does Richard need the money? The issue of lawyers seems a little strange as well, seeing as the site isn’t corporate and is in fact governed by Ning.com (who I assume have lawyers).

I was recently invited by vjack to join his new group on Atheist Nexus; a group dedicated to stamping down on atheist discrimination. It’s a great idea, and I support it even if I have now left Atheist Nexus. I suggest anyone still on the site joins the group straight away.

Once I got the email inviting me to join the group, I went straight to Atheist Nexus and did indeed join it. However, I noticed a link at the top of the page saying something about “Phase 1″ of fund raising. Intrigued, I went to the page and read.

Brother Richard starts by commenting on the wonderful transformation the site has gone, becoming one of the fastest growing atheist sites on the web. He also tells how he recently sold his business and is in a state of “semi-retirement”. He wants to spend the rest of the year (which he claims does not need that much income) helping with the site. However, he states:

Of course, it is our hope that the site will continue to grow and provide a comfortable income for our family and the staff that has been working with us, but only time will tell.

What? Excuse me? Since when did Atheist Nexus, a free site, hosted by a free organisation (Ning) for FREE become a platform for earning money? So now we see the corporate nature of Brother Richards ideas. Instead of simply relying on volunteers he decides to earn some money for doing what most people would call a “hobby”. The site doesn’t need that much tending. All the admin is done by Ning, as are the server upgrades and anything else that might take time. What was wrong with keeping volunteers to do the work? I’d already gladly volunteered to help redesign and possibly remake the entire site (FOR FREE) but I never got a response.

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