Iain Maciver writes …

Desperately flailing around to find excuses for the putrid intolerance he so enthusiastically promotes, John Macleod, that self-appointed and self-obsessed spokesman for the sabbatarian lobby, is now (Hebrides News, March 6) intent on skewing the debate into a row about rich people and some wretched poor sabbatarian church mice.

If that was true, who the heck owns all these 4×4s and late-registration Mercs and Jags which bung up the streets of Stornoway around these towering temples to bigotry and anti-Roman Catholic sentiment each Sunday?

The message of the camel and the needle – like so many of the finer texts on love and forgiveness in the bible – is nowadays blithely ignored in the Free Presbyterian Church, the flighty Macleod’s latest spiritual home. His fulminations against basic human freedoms seem to have so blinded him to how enriched the adherents in the same pew as him mostly now are. He must be too taken up swallowing the continuing hateful, anti-family message from his latest chosen pulpit.

His is a historically-barmy denomination which preaches that if a member’s sibling or son marries into another faith, the church member should turn against them rather than make the joy of his family complete and be happy for them. And you should see the names these family-wreckers  have in their doctrinal documents for other faiths and their leaders. They should be prosecuted for hate crime. Yet you will find nothing in the bible to give them a mandate to preach it. It is all man-made, rabble-rousing balderdash.

The tales I have been told recently of how foul and anti-family some of our local “holy” people really are would make your hair stand on end. Particularly in Point.

Why should we wonder when such extremely intolerant narrow-minded types want to manipulate the rest of us? Up here, sensible types tend to ignore them and dismiss them as a wee bit loopy, because they are. Yet they are also extremists. We all know it is to a different degree but, from the crusades right up to 9/11, 7/7 and the many other atrocities inspired by faith, we should know by now what loopy people are capable of when gripped with religious fervour.

There is a pattern, whatever the religion. They all claim their holy book alone is the word of God and must be followed to the letter. On Lewis, we must assume that means they actually want to kill those unconcerned, freedom-loving individuals they call sabbath breakers. After all, their book says so. Just read Exodus 35:2: “Six days shall work be done, but on the seventh day there shall be to you an holy day, a sabbath of rest to the Lord: whosoever doeth work therein shall be put to death.” Eh?

Do our friendly, local extremists in our “free” churches actually believe that last bit – which the pick ‘n’ mix religionists deliberately left out of the more-widely read Ten Commandments? The answer is yes. Some do. Ask them. That is what is preached. Some will just smile when you ask. Press them.

I wonder if that was a set of gallows I saw up at the top of Scotland Street the other night? After all, they would only be doing what their particular holy book tells them.  And the same people will argue fiercely that every word in it is as relevant and up-to-date as the day it was written.

It is an appalling betrayal of our forefathers who defied the Nazis to defend our freedoms that we now have to do the same because of the ambitions of these fundamentalist sects of home-grown bigots, albeit now in sensible lace-ups and slip-ons rather than jackboots.

Believer, agnostic or athiest, every single one of us must stand up to anyone who seeks to destroy our rights, hard-won after oceans of blood. It matters little whether the dictator’s name is Herr Hitler or Reverend Tallach. The principle must be the same. We are free; we decide.

Even in Germany, which the monstrous Macleod seems happy to hold up as a wonderful example of responsible retail sabbatarianism, the main sports centre franchises, like McFit, Kaifu Lodge and Holmes Place, are open to all on Sundays. They are widely used by families – sometimes before and after church services. And why not? If that is what the people want.

The principle of exercising our freedom of choice is the same – whether to bend the knee to the Führer or be banned from using a sports centre on a particular day. We are a civilised grown-up society, and my father, grandfather and many like them, fought so we could decide. No one else. The FPs can just stay home and be grumpy if they want to – as they have always done.

Let us tell the haters what we think. Let us tell the snarling, twisted John Macleod, so sickeningly vicious and self-important as the Learned Scribe that he cannot hide the stench of arrogance he gives off, as always sneering down his snivelling snout at other mere mortals for their “tangled prose”. That any church welcomes poisonous snobs like that on its pew is another reason to walk quickly by.

Things will change. History will judge harshly, as it does witchdoctors, the hatemongering power-brokers who have manipulated islanders and stripped us of our rights, even in this long-awaited latter age of reason. It will also damn those of our current elected representatives who are, for the chance of grabbing a few paltry votes, so shamefully selling us out for that mess of pottage rather than standing up proudly for everyone who lives on these islands rather than for the bigoted, extremist, hateful few.