{"id":605,"date":"2007-08-11T11:57:12","date_gmt":"2007-08-11T10:57:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=605"},"modified":"2007-08-11T11:57:12","modified_gmt":"2007-08-11T10:57:12","slug":"from-secret-agent-to-gods-messenger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=605","title":{"rendered":"From secret agent to God&#8217;s messenger"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Seven years ago, I spoke at a conference in London organised by an organisation called the Freedom Forum. I was there representing the Internet Watch Foundation &#8211; which I chaired for six years &#8211; defending the blocking of access on the Internet to images of child abuse.<br \/>\nAnother speaker at the event was <a href=\"http:\/\/www.five.org.uk\/security\/mi5org\/shayler.htm\">David Shayler<\/a>, a former MI5 agent who had blown the whistle on the organisation and later spent seven weeks in prison for breaching the Official Secrets Act. I didn&#8217;t actually speak to him; I was more interested in having a conversation with his girlfriend, Annie Machon, who had also been an MI5 agent. The media dubbed her <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/shayler\/article\/0,,840448,00.html\">&#8220;the spy who love me&#8221;<\/a>.<br \/>\nOver the years, Shayler&#8217;s pronouncements have become more and more bizarre and conspiratorial and in an interview this week with More4 News &#8211; reported in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/pages\/live\/articles\/news\/news.html?in_article_id=474364&#038;in_page_id=1770\">a piece<\/a> in the &#8220;Daily Mail&#8221; &#8211; he claimed to be God. It seems that he has seen a psychic who he believes channelled the spirit of Mary Magdalene and anointed him as the Messiah. He claims that his new-found divinity gives him the ability to change the weather and that his meditation had stopped the summer&#8217;s attempted bombings in London.<br \/>\nNow Shayler is not the first person by a long way to claim to be God or least God&#8217;s messenger. As an atheist, I&#8217;m intrigued how many religious people decide to accept some of these claims and not others. As someone who shared a conference once with Shayler, I&#8217;d be interested to know if Annie Machon is still standing by her man.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Seven years ago, I spoke at a conference in London organised by an organisation called the Freedom Forum. I was there representing the Internet Watch Foundation &#8211; which I chaired for six years &#8211; defending the blocking of access on the Internet to images of child abuse. Another speaker at the event was David Shayler, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=605"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/605\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}