Blasphemy Day

I've just found out (suppose I should have checked before) that today is International Blasphemy Day. The title of this post links to the site Blasphemy Day , which was set up to "open up all religious beliefs to the same level of free inquiry, discussion and criticism to which all other areas of academic interest are subjected." which is not only a noble cause but also gives us an extra excuse, as if one were needed, to ridicule beliefs held and proselytised without foundation in reality. Excellent.

The site makes no attempt to debate the existence or non-existence of Gods of any flavour, and makes it quite clear that such topics are well outside it's remit.


The reason that September 30th has been chosen for this day of blasphemy, is that it was on this day in 2005 that those infamous cartoons of Mohammed were published in the Danish Newspaper Jyllands-Posten. As a result of this, we found out just how fragile our values of 'free speech' and 'free expression' are here in Britain, as every single one of our newspapers declined to print any of the images, ostensibly for fear of causing offence, in reality for fear of having their windows broken by ramapaging mobs of hate-filled bigots, sorry, I mean peaceful and devout Muslims whose feelings were hurt by nasty cartoonists. I don't know about you, but if somebody hurts my feelings or criticizes something I hold dear, I don't feel the need to charge through the streets shouting, throwing stones and waving placards that say 'behead those who insult x' and 'butcher those who mock x'. Maybe I just don't have a highly enough developed sense of outrage.

So as mobs of  'offended' young men threatening obscene acts of violence paraded through the streets of Europe, waving their disgusting banners, shouting insults, throwing stones, spitting bile and showing us just how much Islam truly is 'the religion of peace', our political and religious leaders lined up in condemnation - of the cartoonists and the newspapers that dared to print them. I know it's a couple of years ago now but this case is so indicative of how our culture and our freedoms are being steadily eroded as we are forced to bend over backwards by our spineless political leaders, to accommodate a tiny minority of - lets not beat around the bush - infantile, ignorant, disgusting, hate-obsessed, violent, bigoted, misogynistic pricks, whose only way of coping with 'hurt feelings' are to get truly mouth-foamingly angry and take to the streets shouting insults and waving banners of such eye-watering evil and cruelty that we simply have no choice but to wring our hands and apologise profusely for upsetting them so much. Well, I would say, grow up you sad bastards and take a peak at the real World. Are you offended by this? Good. You don't just deserve to have your feelings hurt, you poor deluded little lambs, you deserve to have that disgusting, anti-human, uncivilized excrement you call the immutable word of God shoved so far down your throat that is makes you at least as half as sick as it makes me.

Now you  may feel I've stepped way over the line, I've insulted you, your holy book, the very tenets by which you claim to live your life, and of course that it is me who is being bigoted and hate-filled. I strongly suspect that the word 'Islamaphobe' has flashed across your consciousness several times, closely followed perhaps, if not preceded by, 'infidel', 'fatwa' and 'death threat'. You may even now be chalking up your banner and sharpening your scimitar in preperation for a march to show just how offended you are. Well, I'll be honest with you, I do hate you. I hate what you beleieve, and I hate what you stand for, but crucially, I don't want to kill you for it, and however much I dislike it, I have to accept that you have a right to believe it - can you say the same about me? I hope you'll change your mind, you'll grow up and see the real world, you'll see that beliefs founded in reality do not need violence to succeed, unless they are threatened by it, but I suspect it is too late for you, that you are so corrupted by hate and medieval bullshit that any chance of you using the mind that (you say) God gave you to actually think about this is lost. For this reason, I feel deeply sorry for you.
But of course Blasphemy day isn't just about the Muslims, it's about everyone who thinks their 'beliefs' should be above criticism (its' just that the Muslims are the only ones insecure enough to feel the need to threaten doubters with death) so without being gratuitously offensive, well not too much, here is my attempt at a little light-hearted blasphemy for each of the major faiths.

Judaism: Do you have any idea how ridiculous you look headbutting that silly wall? Do you really think God would make you his 'chosen people'? Why on Earth does God want you to have such ridiculously curly hair? Just what is God planning to do with that mountain of foreskins? Seems a bit daft that he would make you so perfectly in his image, then order you to cut off a bit of your knob.

Catholicism: Ah, a monotheism. With three Gods. Who are also one God. Mmm, you drink the blood of your God - if it really was blood and not just cheap plonk, do you have any idea how disgusting that would make you? Yes, a monotheism whose followers worship a pantheon of saints. Bit odd, eh? So hows that mile-high true cross coming along, have you collected all the splinters yet?

Greek and Russian Orthodox: - as above, just can't agree on the dates. Oh, and much nicer priestly outfits, those hats are great.

Protestantism - mainstream denominations: Catholics are wrong, of course, you got it right. So right that ther're literally thousands of different churches, all interpreting the 'word of God' differently. You'd think God would be a bit more careful when writing his truths, not to make them so ambiguous eh? Well who am I to judge, you're the experts...

Protestantism - evangelical denominations: Yes, thats right, the Bible is true, all true, ALL OF IT! Especially those bits that contradict each other, they're especially true. So, are you rapture ready? Its coming, you know, any day now. Any day. Any day now... Well, OK we're still waiting, but seriously, it is coming... any day...

Islam: I hardly need say anything, you're just a complete joke. A lethal joke, but funny none the less. Take a look at the images I've included to see just how incredibly funny you really are. So fucking funny that you make me puke.

Mormonism:  Oh no thats offensive isn't it? I mean Church of Jesus Christ of The Latter Day Saints: Well, the mind boggles, just reading the history of your 'religion' had me rolling in the aisles. A holy book dictated to an illiterate con-man (keep up people, I've done Islam already) telling the story of the lost tribe of Israel who somehow made it to the Americas. Gold-tabletted commandments that could only be seen by a convicted fraudster and magically disappeared into heaven afterwards... truly beyond satire. Thanks for helping me out with my genealogy research, by the way, but you need to go back through it again as you put one of my Carsberg relatives in the wrong family. I'd hate it if, come judgement day, God got all confused when reading your records and left my great great great grandfather in limbo.

Hinduism: Well take your pick, we've got a God for all occasions, and one of our holiest Gods is the one we drink from, bathe in, wash our clothes in, drain our sewerage in and of course scatter our dead in. Yummy.

Buddhism: Ah the ultimate path to enlightenment, the only way by which our essences may leave this mundane plane and escape the endless cycle of reincarnation. All you need to do is sit very still and think about it until you stop thinking about anything. And shave your head, of course, one cannot achieve spiritual enlightment with the weight of hair pressing down on you.

Sikhism: - The only path to God is to never cut your hair. What??

I think thats enough for now, as tempting as it is to rain down insults on the faithful, I'd hate to sink to their level of peurility, so I will close now by simply quoting from the Blasphemy Day website:

"Blasphemy Day, because your god is a joke."

A Note on Why Any Catholic Should Know Better Than Ever to Mention Nazism

In my previous post, Polish Catholic Magazine Ordered to Pay Damages to Abortion Woman I mentioned that the editor of the magazine, Father Marek Gancarczyk, was accused of comparing abortion to the Nazi and other fascist exterminations of Jews carried out in Europe in the 1930's and 40's. When discussing many societies' growing acceptance of abortion, at least on medical grounds, he wrote that "They had become accustomed to the murders being carried out behind the fence of the camp. And what is the case today? Different, but just as terrible." A clear statement to the effect that all those who tolerate abortion are no different to the citizens of the Third Reich and other fascist regimes who made no attempt to stop the exterminations of Jews, Romany, Homosexuals, the mentally ill and other minorities during the darkest years of our continent's recent history. By stating "what is the case today? Different, but just as terrible." he clearly means to say that the abortion of foetuses for any reason is comparable to rounding up, imprisoning, torturing, starving, raping, beating and eventually shooting or gassing millions of people.

After my initial anger at reading this had subsided, I tried to think about why and how he could make this comparison, and really mean it. I tried to understand it from his point of view, but I just can't. Whatever one thinks about the rights and wrongs of abortion, one cannot possibly reasonably compare the killing, even 'murder' if you insist, of an embryo with little or no feeling or sensation of pain, and absolutely no comprehension of it, that exists only as a potential life, to the brutal torture and incarceration of a fully grown human being with thoughts, feelings, a full understanding of what pain means, living in hell in the full knowledge that at any time they are likely to be shot or gassed.

So even when I attempt to be reasonable I cannot forgive Father Gancarczyk for making such a disgusting comparison.

But I'm not going to be reasonable, because of course Father Gancarczyk is a Catholic. And that means that whatever he and his fellow Catholics feel about the Holocaust now, and however much they may like to say that murdering lots of Jews is really bad (at least as bad as abortion, anyway) the Church as an organisation was, shall we say, somewhat less bothered by the murder of around 6 million people at the time.

Before Hitler rose to power in 1933, the Church frowned on membership of the Nazi party, and threatened excommunication to clergy who joined it. Dismayed by the erosion of Church authority (specifically in the areas of education and culture) under the Weimar republic however, the Vatican was pleased to negotiate the Reichskonkordat with Hitler's new government in 1933, and although the Church retained certain 'reservations' about the Nazi party, the threat of excommunication for those who wanted to join it was lifted.

Fact: - The first international treaty signed by Hitler's government was with the Vatican.

Fact: - Parishes were ordered by the Church to hand over their records to the Nazi authorities, greatly assisting them in their quest to identify Jews.

Relations between the Vatican and Germany were strained at best during the 30's, and the Vatican made frequent protestations to Hitler's government about the treatment of Jews and other minorities. What really annoyed the Church though, enough to request every priest to deliver a sermon on the subject, was the Nazi party's use of pagan symbolism.

Pope Pius XI died in 1939, and with him died any possibility of the Church taking any kind of strong, meaningful stand against Hitler's regime. The Cardinal, who as Vatican foreign secretary had negotiated and signed the Concordat with Hitler in 1933, was elected Pope Pius XII. The Vatican took a resolutely neutral position throughout the war.

Whilst the Church's official position was ambiguous at best, of course many Catholics risked their lives to speak out against Nazism, or to take direct action by saving Jews from certain death, and this is of course commendable, but set against the fact that so many of Hitler's high command were devout Catholics, and that approximately 30% of Germany's population were Catholic (from which you can pretty easily infer that around 30% of concentration camp guards were probably also Catholic) the actions of a few decent people hardly weighs against the complicity of a few millions.

So Catholics had not only "become accustomed to the murders being carried out behind the fence of the camp" but were in fact responsible for many of those murders in the first place, from the whole conception of the Holocaust (Himmler) to the people responsible for implementing it (notably Rudolf Hoss and others) right down to the ordinary foot-guards in the firing squads and gas chambers.

Fact: - No Catholic, from the leaders of the Nazi party or the SS, right down to ordinary foot soldiers and civilians, no matter how many deaths and how much misery they were responsible for, was excommunicated for their part in the Holocaust.

Fact: - Any Catholic who wished to join the Italian communist party after the war, was threatened with excommunication.

Fact: - The Vatican helped several war criminals escape to south America by issuing passports to them.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the Catholic Church is solely responsible for this particular instance of the murder of millions of innocents, just that it was at least as complicit, if not more so, as anybody else. I would like it therefore if flat-footed ignorant cretins like Father Marek Gancarczyk would pause for a moment and bear this in mind before they ever, ever attempt to invoke the greatest crime of all time in support of their pathetic, half-baked, knee-jerk, ill-conceived and anti-intellectual positions.

The picture I include at the top of this article is deliberately provocative, but I hope it will serve to remind Catholics of why they should keep their ignorant mouths shut, and rest their bilious writing hands without setting pen to paper, next time the thought of invoking the Holocaust in favour of their 'argument' occurs to them.

Polish Catholic Magazine Ordered to Pay Damages to Abortion Woman

A Roman Catholic magazine by the name of Gosc Niedzielny, published by the Polish archdiocese of Katowice, was ordered on Wednesday to pay damages of 30,000 Zloties (approx. $11,000 US or 7,400 Euros) and issue a written apology to a woman who sought an abortion on medical grounds, after likening her to a child murderer and comparing abortion to Nazi war crimes.

Alicje Tysiac, now 38, was not allowed to abort her third child back in 2000 despite being told by doctors that giving birth could cost her her sight. Abortion is illegal in Poland except in extreme circumstances, such as if the life of the mother is threatened, or if the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest, and even then only up to the first twelve weeks of pregnancy.

As a result of the birth, Ms Tysiac suffered a retinal haemorraghe and her eyesight is now irreversibly damaged.

Ms Tysiac took her case to the European Court of Human Rights and in 2007 the Polish Government were ordered to pay her 25,000 Euros in compensation.

Following this ruling the magazine's editor, Father Marek Gancarczyk, wrote: "We live in a world where a mother receives an award for very much wanting to kill her child, but not being allowed to do so."

In a clear comparison between the acceptance of abortion and the Nazi extermination of Jews his article also stated that: "They had become accustomed to the murders being carried out behind the fence of the camp. And what is the case today? Different, but just as terrible."

Judge Ewa Solecka ruled that the article (whose text I am unfortunately unable to find; I'm sure its a delightful read) had shown "contempt, hostility and malice" toward Ms Tysiac and ordered the magazine to compensate her and issue an apology. The judge also said that Catholics have the right to express their disapproval of abortion, and to call it murder, but they do not have the right to vilify (IE libel) individuals.

The magazine is planning an appeal on grounds of "infringement of freedom of speech". The editor also denied comparing abortion to Nazi exterminations, as well he might, as I'll come to shortly.

OK, we all know that there are many good reasons for being opposed to abortion as simply a choice, fewer for being opposed to it in cases such as this where there are medical grounds for seeking one. I would state categorically that religious belief, and adherence to religious doctrine, do not count as legitimate reasons for anything at all. In any circumstances, for any reason, ever. If your opinion - no matter how deeply and passionately held, however genuinely and even well-intentioned it is - is based upon a belief; based upon what you have been told by an authority, whose own authority rests simply on belief and tradition; based upon a random interpretation of an old book (that you almost certainly have not read from cover to cover) that you believe to be the word of God, a God you cannot prove or in fact feel any need to prove because you know he exists, and you know your opinion comes from doing what he wants, then quite frankly, your opinion is worth about as much as one of my farts, so kindly keep it yourself.

I'll say it again - opinions derived from religion are worth nothing. Absolutely nothing at all, because they are based upon nothing. If you want to bring real morality to a discussion, to invoke (in this instance) science, medicine, or give a real reason why this lady should have been forced to have a child that could've blinded her, then I'm sure you could find lots of decent things to say and have a really good, mature discussion about it - perhaps even win the debate. If you want to say that you think abortion is simply murder, in any circumstances, but hide behind an invisible man in the sky (or all-too visible Nazi in the Vatican) rather than actually think (if you are capable of it) why you really hold this opinion, then you need to have your bible (large print, naturally) inserted width-ways into the aperture you normally use to speak out of. Alternatively, shut the fuck up until you have something constructive to bring to the discussion, you faith-obsessed simpleton.

OK, first rant over, and I know before you say it that I'm not being very constructive here either, and you will have noticed by now that I've not actually stated what I think about abortion as a whole, or this case in particular. Well sorry to disappoint, but my personal opinion on the subject is worth very little too, and will remain hidden unless you want to contact me and really find out. (Don't bother, it's almost certainly not worth it.)

Does this disqualify me from commenting on this case? I think not, because whilst my opinion on this particular case is largely worthless, the continuing damage done to all and sundry by the witless witterings of the Catholic clergy compels me to speak out, and roundly condemn the Church and all its minions and followers as deluded, dangerous and deeply damaging. (Yes, I am experimenting with alliteration, well spotted.)

In this instance you might have little or no sympathy for Ms Tysiac because she was told after the birth of her second child that having another could blind her. How foolish, you may say, to get pregnant again - she should have used contraceptives... No, of course not, that isn't allowed by the Catholic church either. Perhaps she should have abstained from sex, after all, if male priests can control all their sexual urges and remain celibate... Best not go there for now eh? There's a whole blogs-worth of comments on that score. No, of course the Church would not force her to abstain from sex; it doesn't deal in cruelty and misery, after all... they would probably recommend 'natural' methods of contraception such as hoping for the best and coitus interruptus, well known to work of course, and who better to advise you on this subject than an organisation entirely made up of men who have never had sex (well, consensual sex with an adult, anyway)?

I'm slightly puzzled as to why the Church does not allow contraception, and yet thinks that pulling your wang out before you ejaculate would not frustrate God's plans. Or why cunningly working out which days you'll (probably, unless your unlucky) be ovulating and not having sex on those days does not go against God's grand design of filling up the world with even more Catholics. I know I haven't been educated enough in the ways of divinity to understand the difference, so I apologise for being such an ignorant heathen, but it just seems a bit daft to me.

If you'll just indulge me a while: - pull out your head from your pious arsehole, wipe the excrement of papal dogma from your eyes and take a quick peak at the real World, allowing what you see to penetrate the mush of musty old stories gathering dust in what could have been your brain, now - see more clearly? Good... tell me what is the difference between not conceiving by wearing a johnny, and not conceiving by not having sex at every single opportunity? Why is it wrong in the Pope's eyes to crack one off, but OK to pull out at the last minute? Why do I produce enough sperm with each ejaculation to repopulate half of Europe? If each human embryo produced is a sacred and blessed life, a little miracle granted the gift of life by God, why do so many of them spontaneously abort? A few other questions spring to mind but you get my point. Can you answer me without saying 'God'? Can you? Can you give me an answer based in reality? I doubt it, but don't worry, it's OK, panic over, you may now replace your head... feel the walls of your religious rectum close over your eyes and ears... yes, that's better, isn't it? Now you can give me a really good, if slightly muffled, answer from the comfort of your own intestines, or perhaps even issue a challenge. Who am I to question Papal authority? To question the rulings of Christ's Vicar on Earth? Who indeed.

I said earlier that I would turn to Father Gancarczyk's comparison between abortion and the Holocaust, but actually I've decided to put that in a separate post. Many of you will be aware of the Church's almost gleeful collaboration with the Nazis, and why any Catholic figure should know better than ever to even allude to them, far less try to use them to further their cause, regardless of how far up their gastro-intestinal tract their head may be.

Comments and abuse welcome.

Gordon Brown Makes Me Depressed

This morning I watched Andrew Marr interviewing Gordon Brown, or rather receive virtually identical replies to each and every question - Yes I'm the right man for the job; I'm single-handedly responsible for saving the world from bankers; Labour will bring us out of recession faster than the Tories (by borrowing more money that my grandchildren will be paying off) etc. Gordon Brown's a hero - no really - it takes some balls to be so unpopular, so bloody useless, and yet remain so determined and bloody-mindedly confident that he really, really is doing our country the best service he can by fighting on to the bitter end and consigning Labour to at least ten to fifteen years in opposition. Good on you Gordon.

When he first took over I thought he'd be alright, there is after all no doubting that he is a very intelligent and determined chap; a career politician, even if he is bit on the dour side. This even seemed a redeeming feature for a while after the unspeakable irritation engendered by watching Blair grin as his leadership hit the rocks.

Two years of his sheer bloody awfulness however has convinced me that actually, he's got barely half a clue what he's doing. I can't help remembering how, as Chancellor, he sold off our gold reserves when the price was at it lowest for years, just to pour a few more billion into public services whose expenditure has rocketed whilst efficiency has dropped by 5%. That gold would certainly come in useful now...

I could go on for a while but actually thinking about Super-Gordon for too long just makes me want to curl into a small ball and cry. And that fake smile (shudders) is enough to give me nightmares.

So we'll only have to deal with him for another few months, at which time I suspect a lot of pundits will be asking this question:

Is Gordon Brown the worst Prime Minister since Neville Chamberlain? And no, before you ask, I haven't forgotten about Jim Callaghan.

Is The Force Against Tesco?

A chap by the name of Daniel Jones was asked to leave a Tesco store in Bangor, north Wales, after refusing to remove a hood that he 'believes' he has to wear in public as part of his religion, and is now considering taking legal action against the company.

Mr Jones, 23, is the founder of the 'International Church of Jediism', which apparently has as many as 500,000 followers worldwide.

Jones (a.k.a. Morda Hehol) said: "It states in our Jedi doctrination (sic) that I can wear headwear. It just covers the back of my head, you have a choice of wearing headwear in your home or at work but you have to wear a cover for your head when you are in public."

He obviously wrote the religion quite well and thought about how to get attention - doubtless you don't have to wear a hood at home because a) no-one is looking and b) you might get a bit hot and sweaty. Similarly when at work because a) you don't want to look a complete freak in front of your colleagues without at least a few hundred years of tradition to support your 'choice' of apparel and b) you'd never get hired in the first place. Speaking as an employer, if any prospective candidate came to an interview wearing a hood and claiming to be a Jedi, I most assuredly would not hire them, however good their CV. Whether you wish to interpret this as religious discrimination or discrimination against the mentally ill is up to you.
In public, of course, one must make a visual statement of your religion; how else is anybody to know that you have chosen the path to salvation and all who disagree are damned?

In response a wag from Tesco's PR department said: "He hasn't been banned. Jedis are very welcome to shop in our stores although we would ask them to remove their hoods. Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yoda and Luke Skywalker all appeared hoodless without ever going over to the Dark Side and we are only aware of the Emperor as one who never removed his hood.If Jedi walk around our stores with their hoods on, they'll miss lots of special offers." Clearly they're not fearing a land-mark legal ruling or a massive compensation claim - they'll probably get away with giving him an apology and a light-sabre.

I'm not sure how to take this... If the guy is being genuine and really thinks his religious freedom has been infringed upon, then he either needs psychiatric help or a good kicking, I'm not sure which. It's possible however that it's just a stunt to show up just how ridiculous the laws protecting religious expression are, and how damaging they can be when used by some people with a politico-religiously motivated agenda. I'm sure most of you remember that Tesco recently faced a legal challenge, under the same set of laws, from a Muslim store worker who refused to handle alcohol (despite being well aware that this would be part of their job). The Chemist chain Boots was also in the spotlight, about a year ago I think, after a pharmacist - a pharmacist! - refused to dispense the contraceptive pill because it went against her religious beliefs.

So if the former is the case, then I'm sorry Mr Hehol, but you're just a sad little wanker. And if the latter, then thank you Mr Jones for bringing down such a great deal of derision and ridicule upon your head in pursuit of reminding us all just how stupid the laws pertaining to the free practice of religion are. The Jury is still out.

Ahmadinejad Still in Denial

That ridiculous little election-stealing monkey, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was once more railing against Israel and denying the Holocaust, at a rally held in Tehran for the annual Al-Quds day. Al-Quds day was instigated by Ayatollah Khomeini shortly after the revolution of 1979, as a day for Muslims around the world to protest against the creation of Israel and the treatment of Palestinians.

Please do not assume that my reference to the dirty, ranting, crumpled little cretin as a 'monkey' is in any way indicative of racism - I am talking only about him, not his co-nationals or co-regionalists (incidentally, Persian women are some of the most beautiful in the world, which is probably why we're not allowed to look at them, but I digress now and am sounding sexist instead of racist, so I'd better move on) I speak only of the fact that he bears an uncanny resemblance to lieutenant Columbo after three weeks on the street. Also, you have to admit that he does look a bit like a monkey.

Of course appearance counts for little where politics is concerned (haha), politics being a discipline where substance is all (haha, again) and we all know that the backbone of Hobo-dinejad's policies involve hating Israel, hating Jews, and giving any Iranian with more than half a brain a strong desire to emigrate. Oh, and of course being the region's military great-power; any chance of the country taking it's rightful place as the region's economic and technological power-house being thoroughly stifled by corruption and religion.

So Tramp-adinejad and his fanatical bigots were rallying yesterday to celebrate Al-Quds. The supporters of his 'defeated' election rival, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, were also out and about being attacked by the state's thugs, sorry police, and Mr Mousavi himself was forced to leave the rally after his car was attacked.

Mr Beggar-dinejad said that the Holocaust was "a lie based on an unprovable and mythical claim" and that "the pretext for the creation of the Zionist regime is false."

It never ceases to amaze me that the political leader of a country entirely based upon centuries old mythical claims can reject mountains, and I do mean mountains, of real, recent, tangible evidence that several million people were murdered for their beliefs just a couple of generations ago, simply for political expedience. I really wonder how many Muslims (and I know it's not just Muslims, before you write in - there are a surprising number of Christian Holocaust deniers too) around the World do not believe that the Holocaust took place. And this is the nub of the matter, the problem with their position is simply one of belief. To the religious mind, belief trumps all else, and the desire to believe a premise is often all that is required to accept it, IE believe it. Evidence to the contrary of your accepted position simply becomes an inconvenience to be skirted around and dismissed - IE dis-believed . For example - I hate Jews, however happy the idea of five million of them dying would make me, I don't want to accept that this happened, because it is convenient for me to believe that it was all a conspiracy to create a Western-friendly state in the middle east, and displace millions of my co-religionists. Because I want to believe this, all evidence that contradicts my position must be false. Only the religious mind can work in this fashion, can work on the principle that truth is something to be chosen and moulded by your preconceptions, rather than something real and definite that exists outside of yourself.

Ahma-dinnerjacket's comments regarding the Holocaust brought the usual condemnation from Western leaders, and the usual 'concerns' regarding Iran's nuclear program, as well as the renewed threat of even more sanctions. I wonder if it might be more appropriate for the World's leaders just to ignore these outbursts - would it not be more effective for World leaders just to laugh at him? To treat him with the derision that this pathetic little excuse for a man deserves, and perhaps to send him a box of bananas, or a signed portrait of Peter Falk? I wonder if my opinions exclude me from a career in the diplomatic corps...

Rowan Williams on Newsnight

His Holiness The Bearded One was on BBC's Newsnight program 'Aftershock, The Crash A Year On' on Tuesday night (the title of this post is a link to the video on the BBC's iplayer service) to discuss the causes and effects of the crash. As you may remember, The Bearded One and his conservative side-kick Dr John Sentamu both made a little bit of a stir last year as the crash was unfolding, by comparing money to a new idol that has been worshipped by certain sectors of the business community (See Hypocrites? Of course not, they're our spiritual leaders! for my take on this at the time).

Admittedly the Archbishop was not given a central role in the program - about 40 minutes were taken up with reports by the economics editor and a debate between business leaders, an ex bank chairman and economics professors - but he was interviewed for several minutes, and his answers were treated with real respect by the interviewer, Jeremy Paxman, a man noted for his tendency to rip less exalted interviewees to shreds.

Everyone has an opinion on this subject, of course, indeed we're all experts now, but where is the sense, and what is the point, of giving serious air time and credence on a serious news program - this edition of which was entirely devoted to a matter of global significance, the effects of which may be felt for generations - to a man who has devoted his life to the study and interpretation of unreality?
Paxman's first question may just have carried a twinge of sarcasm - he basically asked the Archbishop if he thought it was odd that the political leaders who espoused the credit-based capitalism blamed for the collapse (Tony Blair, George Bush et al) were Christians. The bearded one gave a small wry smile at this, but answered that yes he did think it was odd, especially when 'some of the inspiration for Tony Blair's ideology did come from communitarian and non-strictly capitalist origins'. So straight away, we're in to the important stuff - Christians were in charge, why did their Christian values not stop this greed? Can anyone else see a little smidgen of irony here?

I've transcribed the rest of the interview for you below (see how thoughtful I am?) to save you the bother of watching the video, though I do recommend watching it anyway as it has good entertainment value. The Archbishop's interview begins about two-thirds of the way through the program.

'I think what happened was an enormous wave of unreality, in the whole system whereby the connection of financial instruments, financial operations, with reality, with production, with relationships just disappeared.'
Paxman - 'Do you wish now that the Church had spoken out more about that climate?'
'I guess I do, but I suppose like most people we felt intimidated by expertise, and that's a very dangerous place for the Church to be, because what I hear now is people saying that experts, in fact, didn't know particularly what they were talking about, there was an enormous confidence trick going on.'
Paxman - 'They convinced the rest of us they did'
'They convinced the rest of us, because I think that most of us have grown up with the idea that economics is an exact science, and that suggests that we haven't actually read Keynes in the first place, because Keynes' stress on uncertainty as something utterly unavoidable in economic activity beyond a certain level, that again seems to have vanished.'
Paxman - 'What do you think this whole crisis has done to us?'
'It's left us I think with, as we saw in the clip just now [reference to a report by economics editor Paul Mason] a quite strong sense of diffused resentment, there hasn't been a feeling of closure about what happened last year, there hasn't been what I as a Christian would call repentance, we haven't heard people saying that actually, no, we got it wrong, the whole, fundamental principle on which we worked was unreal, was empty.'
Paxman - 'You're talking about the bankers now?'
'I'm talking about bankers but also about all of us who, as you reminded me, Church included, colluded with this.'
Paxman - 'So we should all repent of what...'
'We should all I think, look back and say...
'Politicians too?
'Politicians too...'
'Everybody?...'
'We can look back and say, well we, we were, hypnotised into that sense of unreality, we allowed a big gulf to open up between how finance appeared to be operating and what it was really generating in terms of wealth, as well being for a community.'
P - 'What do you think we should have learned from what's happened?'
'Certainly that economics is too important to be left to economists, that there is no such thing as the rational self-regulating market beyond a very very limited range of activities, therefore that awkward amateurs do have their role in this, whether it's artists or historians or even the odd theologian [wry smile] coming in to say, well, what is wealth? What is this wealth creation that we talk about? We can understand how investment and production that allows purchasing power to be in the hands of more people, that's wealth creation. Whether wealth creation is simply the statistic of a larger amount of money on paper or a screen to be concentrated in certain hands, whether that counts as wealth creation, I'm not even sure.'
P - 'And when you see, as we are told now, of many of the financial institutions going back to business as usual before hand, bonuses and all the rest of it, what do you think?'
'I worry. I feel that, that that's precisely what I call the lack of closure, coming home to roost, it's a failure to name what was wrong, to name that, erm, well, what I called last year idolatry, that, projecting reality and substance on to things that don't have them.'
P - 'What should the Government have done'
'[laughs softly] I think the Government was bound to act, in the way it did as a damage limitation exercise, I, I'm not an economist, I can't comment on the details of that. I saw what Baroness Vadera [Junior minister in the department of business]said about that earlier today in the Standard [London Evening Standard, daily newspaper] I understand the motivation, I don't know what Governments can do...'
P - 'Should they have capped bonuses?'
'I would have said yes, yes, and I think that, that's one of those things that, feeds, the, what I call the diffused resentment that people are...'
P - 'Mm'
'... Somehow getting away with a culture in which the connection between the worth of what you do and what you get, again becomes more obscure.'
P - 'You've referred to resentment now two or three times, [pause] how strongly felt is that? Do, do, d'you, d'you, d'you fear unrest almost?'
'I wouldn't go as far as that, what I'm picking up is just that sense of, of, bafflement, of, a muted anger, that the bonus culture isn't challenged, I wouldn't say unrest but I think that what we are looking at is, is, the possibility of a society getting more and more dysfunctional if the levels of inequality that we've seen in the last couple of decades are not challenged.'
Paxman thanks him and closes the interview.

OK, so I've just transcribed it without dropping in any comments of my own. I am pretty sure that any atheists reading this have spotted the irony and hypocrisy a mile off, and I would put a little bit of money on most Christians spotting it too, but just in case you haven't, go back through the transcript and wherever you see a reference to 'finance', 'economist' or 'wealth' etc, substitute 'religion', 'Christianity', 'God' or 'The Church', and hopefully the hypocrisy will leap from the page.

I'm not saying that the man didn't have anything worth saying about the subject, he is, after all, a decent and intelligent chap, but as I said, we all have an opinion about this subject now, and he was giving his opinion as leader of our State Religion. I would therefore give his utterances more value if he had merely given the interview as Dr R. Williams, 'Concerned' of Canterbury.

I can sense your disappointment there, yes you at the back - 'What! how can he transcribe a whole interview without dropping in his customary sarcasm?' Well fear not, because I can't resist it, I just didn't want to clutter up a decently funny interview with my pointless witterings until you had a chance to read it for yourselves.

There now follows the same transcript, with previous square brackets removed, and my own attempt at humour and/or outrage inserted.

'I think what happened was an enormous wave of unreality, in the whole system whereby the connection of financial instruments, financial operations, with reality, with production, with relationships just disappeared.'
Paxman - 'Do you wish now that the Church had spoken out more about that climate?'
'I guess I do, but I suppose like most people we felt intimidated by expertise, and that's a very dangerous place for the Church to be,[Should be used to it after 300 years] because what I hear now is people saying that experts, in fact, didn't know particularly what they were talking about, [We in the Church do, of course] there was an enormous confidence trick going on.' [!!]
Paxman - 'They convinced the rest of us they did'
'They convinced the rest of us, because I think that most of us have grown up with the idea that economics is an exact science, [just as many of us were forced to grow up believing the Church is aways right] and that suggests that we haven't actually read Keynes in the first place, because Keynes' stress on uncertainty as something utterly anavoidable in economic activity beyond a certain level, that again seems to have vanished.' [Last year he quoted Marx, now he's invoking Keynes - are we seeing a further shift to left in the Church?]
Paxman - 'What do you think this whole crisis has done to us?'
'It's left us I think with, as we saw in the clip just now a quite strong sense of diffused resentment, [and a great deal more uncertainty that my minions are even now attempting to capitalise on (Church attendance is reportedly up in some areas as a direct consequence of 'material uncertainty')] there hasn't been a feeling of closure about what happened last year, there hasn't been what I as a Christian would call repentance, [repent ye sinners! Fill our collection plates!] we haven't heard people saying that actually, no, we got it wrong, the whole, fundamental principle on which we worked was unreal, was empty.' [We will never see this day while belief is prevalent, maybe one day.]
Paxman - 'You're talking about the bankers now?'
'I'm talking about bankers but also about all of us who, as you reminded me, Church included, colluded with this.'
Paxman - 'So we should all repent of what...'
'We should all I think, look back and say...
'Politicians too?
'Politicians too...'
'Everybody?...'
'We can look back and say, well we, we were, hypnotised into that sense of unreality, we allowed a big gulf to open up between how finance appeared to be operating and what it was really generating in terms of wealth, as well being for a community.' [Just keep substituting 'religion' for 'finance', no further comment is required]
P - 'What do you think we should have learned from what's happened?'
'Certainly that economics [theology] is too important to be left to economists, [theologians] that there is no such thing as the rational self-regulating market [religion] beyond a very very limited range of activities, [preferably none at all] therefore that awkward amateurs [non-believers] do have their role in this, whether it's artists or historians or even the odd theologian [scientist] coming in to say, well, what is wealth? [religion?] What is this wealth creation [fiction] that we talk about? We can understand how investment and production that allows purchasing power to be in the hands of more people, that's wealth creation. Whether wealth creation is simply the statistic of a larger amount of money on paper or a screen to be concentrated in certain hands, whether that counts as wealth creation, I'm not even sure.'
P - 'And when you see, as we are told now, of many of the financial institutions going back to business as usual before hand, bonuses and all the rest of it, what do you think?'
'I worry. I feel that, that that's precisely what I call the lack of closure, coming home to roost, it's a failure to name what was wrong, to name that, erm, well, what I called last year idolatry, [said the man with a graven image of a man suffering unspeakable torture dangling from his neck] that, projecting reality and substance on to things that don't have them.' [!!]
P - 'What should the Government have done'
'I think the Government was bound to act, in the way it did as a damage limitation exercises, I, I'm not an economist, [I don't have any more of an idea than the rest of you; the fact that I am a spiritual leader, well versed in bullshit, lends credence and authority to my opinion] I can't comment on the details of that. I saw what Baroness Vadera said about that earlier today in the Standard. I understand the motivation, I don't know what Governments can do...'
P - 'Should they have capped bonuses?'
'I would have said yes, yes, and I think that, that's one of those things that, feeds, the, what I call the diffused resentment that people are...'
P - 'Mm'
'... Somehow getting away with a culture in which the connection between the worth of what you do and what you get, again becomes more obscure.'
P - 'You've referred to resentment now two or three times, [pause] how strongly felt is that? Do, do, d'you, d'you, d'you fear unrest almost?'
'I wouldn't go as far as that, what I'm picking up is just that sense of, of, bafflement, of, a muted anger, that the bonus culture isn't challenged, I wouldn't say unrest but I think that what we are looking at is, is, the possibility of a society getting more and more dysfunctional [said the chap who not so long ago voiced the opinion that adopting some aspects of Sharia law in the UK is 'unavoidable'] if the levels of inequality that we've seen in the last couple of decades are not challenged.' [Thanks for having me, I'm off back to the palace now for a couple of sherries and a quick chat with God before bed.]

There simply is no sense in giving authority to the words of a spiritual leader, when they are speaking as such. I would ask that the BBC ask someone more qualified to give their opinion and fill five minutes next time - just grab a random passing bloke off the street for a good common-man's opinion. Alternatively, for balance they should also invite the chief Rabbi and whichever member of the Muslim Council of Great Britain is currently claiming to speak for all Muslims five minutes too, then I could write a post three times as long.

It's Religion Jim, but not as we know it!

On a little more light-hearted note today - I was gazing last night before I went to sleep, as I so often do, at the few stars whose light is able to penetrate the dense orange fug of London's night, wondering how many of them might have planets like our own orbiting them... how many of them provide light and life for alien worlds. Thinking how many planets, in all the vastness of space, and all the immensity of time past, present and future, might hold intelligent life, might hold civilizations of thoughtful beings like ourselves. Lost in my frequent nocturnal imaginings, it suddenly occured to me that our own planet, with just one dominant species, has managed to spawn at least seven major religions, and countless minor ones. What if there are, or have been, or will be, millions of planets with intelligent aliens, all with thousands of religions of their own... imagine a Universe where religion is endemic - imagine interplanetary holy wars!
On this happy note, I let the curtain drop and tried to get some sleep.
Amazingly, I didn't have any nightmares.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place - or Tarred With Two Equally Nasty Brushes

On Friday a demonstration planned by a group called Stop the Islamisation Of Europe (SIEO) in Harrow, north-west London, was called off at the last minute, at the request of the police, in order to prevent a breach of the peace. The group wanted to protest against plans to build a new, larger mosque next to an older building that is no longer big enough to serve the needs of the local Muslim population.

In the event around twenty or so of the demonstrators turned up, and were met by more than a thousand counter-protesters organised by United Against Fascism (UAF). The counter-demonstration was well organised and supported, and several well known figures including the local MP (one Tony McNulty) and the London Assembly member for Brent and Harrow gave talks at an earlier rally. There were a few minor clashes between police and members of the UAF when the small contingent of SIEO chaps turned up and were chased away by Muslim youths, many of whom were inexplicably wearing balaclavas or scarves to cover their faces and wielding sticks, bottles or stones in that time-honoured tradition of peaceful counter-demonstration.

There has been almost universal condemnation for the SIEO, and the Culture Secretary, John Denham, compared their aims and methods to those of the Blackshirts' anti-Jewish marches in the 30's and National Front rallies in the 70's. Condemnation of armed and masked young men has so far not been forthcoming.

I have a lot of sympathy with the UAF and support much of their stated position, though I emphatically do not share their leftist political ideals. In this instance I have no sympathy at all with the SIEO's demonstration - I see no reason why the Muslims of Harrow should not have a mosque large enough for their needs (apart, of course, from my idealistic desire to see all places of worship rendered obsolete). The BBC's report showed footage of the inside of the current mosque - a poky little building with a low, corrugated iron ceiling. Were the SIOE marching against 'Islamism' or 'Islamic extremism' however I would be right behind them.

The problem I have is that I feel stuck in the middle and unable to express an opinion that I feel I have arrived at through common-sense, reason, and a genuine concern for the future of my country, without being labelled either a fascist or a leftist.

It is a real, genuine problem that so many Muslims in our cities live in isolated communities and want nothing to do with non-Muslims. It is a real problem that in many mosques up and down the land, Imams imported from Arab countries or Pakistan rail about the primacy of Islam and tell their flock - many of whom are young men, unsure about their positions in society and undecided about the direction their lives should take - that Western values will corrupt their faith and that they should reject them. It is a real problem that some sections of these communities hate their own country so much that they would gladly kill our citizens in the name of their faith. It is a real problem that so many young girls are sent for brief 'holidays' to visit their 'uncles' in north Africa or Pakistan, only to return without their external genitalia. It is a real problem that so many young men and women are sent to their parents countries to get married (not to mention the number of women who are married against their will) rather than marry here. It is a real problem that so many people who come to live in this country despise the values that it stands for - that our grandparents fought and died for - and want the country to change to suit them. And I could go on... Now tell me honestly - because I am perfectly prepared to review my position if I am mistaken - does saying any of this make me a fascist? An Islamophobe? A racist?

It is a real problem that minor far-right parties like the British Nationalist Party (BNP) are gaining ground in some areas of the country, by exploiting and misdirecting the fears of sections of the indigenous population, but this is only possible because politicians in all major parties feel unable, or are unwilling, to speak out against the growth and increasing insularity of Muslim communities, for fear of incurring the wrath of a minority who are not only willing to use violence, but who are positively itching for the chance.
I despise the BNP and all that they stand for, but does this make me a lefty?

So this post is for all those people who, like me, feel trapped between a rock and a hard place. Who would naively like to see people of all faiths and backgrounds just coming together and getting along with one another. Who would like to see second and third generation immigrants genuinely feeling that Britain is their home, without expecting it to change for them. I know I'm dreaming, and I know I'm being hopelessly naive, but hey, a man can dream, can't he?

Check the following links for background info:

BBC's online article
SIOE homepage
UAF homepage

Just to clarify, I do not and would not buy either the Daily Mail or the Daily Express. In fact, I would rather walk around in soiled underwear than use either of these publications to wipe my arse if I'd run out of toilet paper. Just thought I'd clear that up.

What on Earth are souls?

Today I am asking for a little help from all those moderate, middle of the road, reasonable believers who accept all the science about the age of the Universe, the age of the World and the full implications of the theory of evolution etc, and yet still believe in a god and still believe that we are special to him and that we must obey his rules, if we are to live for ever and ever in eternal bliss, amen.

I need a little help to understand souls - those little mind-pearls of mysterious essence that reside within us and record our personalities for posterity when our frail physical bodies bite the dust.

Now I'm no expert on this subject, which is partly why I'm asking for help here, but it seems that all cultures and all belief systems, from your basic common or garden animistic ancestor-worship, right up to your full-blown global monotheism with aspirations of World domination, all have some kind of belief in an eternal soul. It must surely be one of our most ancient beliefs; any people that took the time and effort to ceremonially bury their dead and include grave-goods such as food, valuables and so forth, would surely have some kind of belief that their recently departed were not gone forever, and the earliest confirmed burial sites are around 130,000 years old.

So this idea of an eternal soul is by no means a recent one, and my bet is that it is as old as a mind complex enough to form the idea.

Before the rise of monotheism, all religions would have been animistic or polytheistic. Animisms ascribe souls, or at least 'intent' to everyday items such as rocks, animals, the sky, volcanoes, rivers etc, because everything around us has some kind of effect on our lives and it may be easier for us to accept or understand these effects, if we believe that these things have 'intent' just like us (see Dennett, 1971, 1983, 1987). Polytheisms on the other hand are generally more advanced in that they have creation myths and ascribe the perceived intent of objects, and even other people, to supernatural beings called gods.

Then along came monotheism - the idea that all of these intents are controlled by a single mind. Curiously enough, the Old Testament makes no claims about the nature of our souls, merely saying that they will return to the God that gave them (Ecclesiastes 12:7) though later Rabbinical literature does talk about our souls being made up of several parts. These later teachings also claim that animals have simple souls.

With Christianity came the idea we are all so familiar with now - that an eternal soul is given to you by God, who will then judge it upon your death on the actions it took while you were alive, and decide whether you should join him in heaven, or burn in the fires of eternal torment. Islam is of course descended from the other two and agrees with Christianity that you either burn or die happily ever after.

Since most of my believing readers will be followers of one of the trinity of monotheisms (sorry, bad pun) I can conveniently skirt around my considerable ignorance of the nature of the soul in the other major religions, Hinduism and Buddhism, and the minor religions. Any passing Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Shintoists (is that the right word?) Jains, Zoroastrians or any other faith are welcome to contact me and let me know their take on the soul, if they so wish.

So lets turn to Christianity and Islam, whose ideas about the soul have such a profound impact on all our lives, unfortunately. It is to practitioners of these faiths that I make my request for help, in understanding how they can believe in eternal souls, whilst still accepting all the science about our origins.

Catholicism is quite clear in that humans have souls, and animals do not. It also claims that the soul is inserted by God into the embryo at the the time of fertilisation, hence all the rubbish about contraception and abortion going against God's design. Why am I suddenly picking on Catholicism, you may ask? Because it is the World's largest Christian sect by a country mile, and so far as I can tell, Islam hasn't really worried too much about how we got souls, you simply have one and if you doubt this, well, you're an apostate and you have to die, so stop asking silly questions and believe what we tell you. To accept the first point, I need this question answering - at what point in our evolutionary history did we develop souls? If animals, which I am assuming include our close brethren, the other great apes, do not have souls, and yet we do, then at some time in the 5- 7 million years or so since our ancestors diverged from the ancestors of chimps and bonobos, we developed, or were given, souls. Now as a card-carrying evolutionist I am tempted to try and solve this puzzle by trying to imagine when and how we evolved souls, but I rather think this is doomed to failure. We can imagine how speciation occurs over time - think if you will of an unbroken chain of your ancestors stretching right back to the dawn of life itself; each successive generation would be able to mate with it's immediate forbears and progeny, but if we took one ancestor out of line and make him or her jump along the chain, say a few thousand or so generations, we'd find that it would no longer be able to produce viable offspring with whichever one of your ancestors is in the line at that point, such would be the accumulated change in the descendant's genome. Yeah OK, so we all know how evolution works, but can it work for souls? Imagine if you will, Ancestor A, a proto-human without a soul, and Ancestor B, a proto-human a couple of thousand generations later with a soul. What happened in between? Did a soul gradually develop from mutations in DNA? Say intermediate Ancestor A1 survives death a few seconds, A1000 for a few hundred years and so on, and then, hey-presto you get Ancestor B with a fully formed soul capable of lasting 'til kingdom come? Doesn't quite work for me, but then maybe I'm suffering from a failure of imagination, or simply the closed mind I am so regularly accused of having. Also of course, if souls were embedded in our DNA then we would be able to isolate them, once we understand fully what each part of our genome actually does (what a coup that would be!) but this is most unlikely since DNA simply codes for protiens, and souls cannot be physical structures as they survive death, so what would soul DNA code for?
Presumably some kind of structure in our brains that holds the magic energy of eternal life. Once again it would be a great coup for the neuroscientist who finds this structure, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

So if you'll forgive my rather fuzzy reasoning on this subject (we are talking about magic after all) I've come to the conclusion that we didn't evolve souls, they must have been given to us sometime in the last 5-7 million years. Hmm. I did say I needed help with this.

So lets turn to the second point above, the belief that souls are given to us at the point of fertilisation. This implies that a human egg is as soul-less as all the hundreds of millions of sperm swimming furiously toward it. But, fear not! For God is watching - nay in fact guiding one of these little spermies inexorably toward the egg, and, as fusion takes place, in goes the soul. So, perhaps we can identify the soul by looking at differences in energy between eggs, sperms and newly fertilised embryos? No? Why not? Because it seems that souls are made of some kind of undetectable energy - IE magic. What a shame, our quest is thwarted once more and we are forced back to the unreasonable position of simply believing in souls without any kind of evidence for them.

OK, so lets accept then that our soul is given to us, and develops along with us throughout our lives. Skipping past the hideous doctrine of limbo that awaits the souls unfortunate enough to be contained within the huge majority of foetuses that spontaneously abort, our soul is born, and takes in all the information provided by the baby's senses. Grows and develops within the mind of the child, becomes an adult and lives it's pointless life, waiting to be released and judged.

If the condition of the soul - it's personality and knowledge, for example - is tied to the body that houses it, what happens if that body is defective, or damaged, or dies before the adult mind is formed? Are we to spend an eternity as a child? As a paraplegic (for example)? As a brain damaged soul? I almost had this argument with a colleague a couple of years ago; I don't know how we got talking about it but I said that it was foolish to think that some part of us survives our death. Unfortunately she was in no mood for rational debate or thinking about this, stridently repeating 'it just can't be like that' whenever I tried to get a word in edge ways. I did manage quickly to ask what happens to a man who is brain-damaged in a car accident, will his soul be damaged too? but to little avail - she dodged the question and started trying to prove her point by talking about near-death-experiences, and all the evidence for them (haha) so I decided that discretion was the better part of valour, and valiantly changed the subject. Any way, I digress.

Now if you happen to be one of those non-believers in any organised religion who still believes we have eternal souls, and are reading this thinking I'm being narrow minded, or attacking a straw-man by picking on the Catholic church (oh, if only it were true! What a better place the World could be if the Catholic faith were a straw man!) then these questions still apply equally to you. Perhaps you believe, as many people do, that animals have souls too; it is still the case that at some point in their evolutionary history they must have acquired them. So when? And How?

It is still the case that nobody can show where in the body the soul resides, or what it is made of, or has any idea how the transmission from physical sensation to ethereal knowledge occurs, whether you are a card-carrying Catholic or a new-age crystal-bothering homeopath.

So to sum up, I don't believe that any part of my psyche will survive the death of my body, being as it is an intrinsic part of it. As I said, maybe it's just because my mind is not open enough, as so many people have said to me (usually after I say I cannot believe in [insert faith-based assertion here] because there is no evidence for it).

So if you want to convince me that I will, in fact, live forever, you need to answer the following questions to my satisfaction:

What are souls?

What are they made of?

Where did they come from?

Which creatures have them, and why?

What happens to my soul if my body and/or brain is damaged?

Should be easy enough, so answers on a postcard please.

Irritation > Apathy

Well, hello again everyone. It is almost a year since I have written a post: it seems that for all that time my latent apathy and laziness were able to out-weigh my need to find release, in the form of writing, for any feelings of irritation, anger, amusement and even out-and-out hair-tearing, teeth-grinding, eye-popping, red faced, screaming apoplexy brought about by the idiotically deranged rantings of the terminally faithful.

Now I don't want you to get the impression that I am in need of anger management classes - I'm generally a pretty mild-mannered sort of chap who wouldn't say boo to a goose - or who would at least have the courtesy to apologise to the goose if it seemed scared afterwards. Nay, in fact for most of life's daily travails I appear so laid back as to be practically horizontal, and for this reason and others I doubt I will ever be successful in life, but, well that's another story and need not concern us here.

Religion, and faith for those of you who make the distinction, have the capacity to get under my skin like nothing else, to really wind me up, to thoroughly get my goat in fact, and sadly it's not even a goat that I can sacrifice to propitiate the god of anger, so I can tell him to let me calm down a bit and lower my blood pressure, being as it is, of course, a merely metaphorical goat.
So what happened, I hear you ask, to kick me up from my stew of apathy and dis-interest long enough to bring me back to this page that has lain unaltered and reader-less for almost a year, and write three paragraphs of bullshit before I even get close to the point? Why now, when every single day, millions of children around the world have their wonderful, inquisitive and innocent little minds inexcusably polluted with ancient myths, and with hatred for those who don't share them? When nearly every day one or more of these products of hate-filled 'education' detonates themselves for the glory of god? When unwanted children are conceived and born because contraception goes against god's design? When another innocent contracts HIV for the same reason? When young girls have their labia and clitoris cut off to prevent any chance of them ever enjoying sex, which would of course make god angry? When women are forced to cover themselves from head to toe because god holds them responsible if a man be aroused enough to rape them? When women are killed by their own families if they are raped, to expunge the shame and restore family 'honour'? When building continues in occupied land because it was given to the Jews by god? When European Governments like my own capitulate in the face of implicit threats of violence and unrest, further eroding our hard-won freedom and national identity? And the list goes on and on and on and on, so, why now?

I don't know, I just felt like it.

Sometimes whole days can go by when the news is free of religious stories, excepting of course the daily casualty list in Afghanistan, and I am prepared to accept that political and economic reasons are as much to blame as religion in that particular case. Occasionally though, several stories are covered at once and I find my blood pressure rising and have to try very hard not to pull out any of my few remaining hairs.

We are of course approaching the anniversary of the 9/11 atrocities, and TV channels are full of programs showing 'new' and 'previously unseen' amateur video footage which is of course deeply harrowing. Not so many show the pictures of Palestinians jubilantly dancing in the street we all remember from the news at the time. I wonder why?

Here in Britain three men have just been convicted of a plot (dramatically dubbed Britain's 9/11) to blow up several airliners in flight, in a second trial (in the first trial the jury were hung and could not reach a unanimous decision) after new evidence was presented. Last night viewers of BBC's Newsnight were presented with the stomach-churning spectacle of an 'ex-extremist' who now works to 'reach out to angry and disaffected young British muslims' explain how otherwise perfectly pleasant young men turn in to psychopathic kaffir-hating would-be murderers (my words, you may have guessed, not his) by having their anger and hatred channelled by unscrupulous Wahhabi Imams preaching a vilely fundamentalist version of Islam, you know, the one that is the state religion in Saudi Arabia. He was saying that of course this result is a triumph for British policing and military intelligence, but might not be perceived as a triumph for British justice because some people, in the grass roots of muslim communities, especially these angry-but-otherwise-perfectly-pleasant-young-men would feel that a retrial was only held so that we could 'get the right result' (note that in the lovely Islamic dictatorships that these men would like Britain to become, a retrial would most certainly not be necessary - indeed an initial trial would probably be unnecessary, we'd simply get an angry mob to stone the accused to death, and all be home by tea-time).

All this pathetic justification from a man who was presumably in his youth just as angry and psychopathic as the remorseless newly convicted jihadis (what happened to make him an 'ex'-extremist, I wonder? Did he just grow up a bit? Did he get married and channel his previously retarded and pent-up emotions in to the more wholesome pastime of sex? Did he perhaps realise that a potentially lucrative career as a pundit and government advisor was preferable to scattering himself over a wide area in the pursuit of murdering kaffirs?) was of course accompanied by the usual hand-wringing from the government's spokesperson, in this case the ex-security minister Tony McNulty - 'ex' because while in office he had the deeply unnerving habit of occasionally departing from the party line and saying what he actually thought about things. Unfortunately for McNulty and the government alike, what he thought usually turned out to be unadulterated bollocks. If I were a cynic (which of course I am) I might suggest that this 'ex' minister was wheeled out to parlay with the 'ex' extremist so that if he should accidentally put his foot in his mouth again it would be very easy for the government to 'distance itself' from his remarks. In the event his remarks were of course wholly un-remarkable, the basic gist being that a) government policy and extra funding for security were responsible for bringing these men to justice and b) we must of course do more to 'reach out' to these poor angry young men, to prevent them being corrupted by hate-filled preachers, and to explain to them, so that they really understand, why as a nation we have to do these things that make them so angry. Yada-yada: poor defenceless angry souls; simply misguided and misled; of course it's our fault that they hate us so much and has nothing at all to do with a literal interpretation of an iron-age murder-manual (oops, better be careful, I might hurt somebody's feelings or cause offence - these count as hate crimes in my 'free' country - how terrible it would be to be accused of 'inciting racial hatred' against a group of people who are most certainly not 'a race' and who have the practice of hatred down to a fine art).

Then lo and behold, the very next item was a special report about the Israeli army. Apparently this avowedly secular organisation has more and more Rabbis joining up to provide moral and religious direction to the troops. Now of course many of the World's armies have ministers and chaplains of some sort to cater for the spiritual needs of their men (and women in some countries), but what makes the Israeli case so interesting and blood-curdlingly frightening is the sheer number of Rabbis joining up, and the fact that they will actually be leading troops in combat operations. So we have the wonderful prospect of Orthodox Rabbis blessing their troops, saying a few prayers and then charging in to battle in the name of god with a rifle in one hand and a Torah in the other. Fantastic. The BBC were not allowed to film these soldiers of god in action, because the Israeli government is understandably a little worried about how this looks abroad, but they did manage to interview a few charming young men at an orthodox seminary who plan to join up. One said that 'god will make our army stronger', another that 'we know god is on our side because he has given this land to us' and the other one said 'we can feel the hand of god guiding our nation's history, look at how we have survived so many wars with so few dead' - nothing to do with having massively superior fire-power and a highly trained and well organised military of course. And where was this 'guiding hand of god' for the last 2000 years or so while the Jews were being pretty much universally hated and persecuted?

So lets not forget that in Gaza, Jerusalem and the West Bank, the Israeli army is an occupying army, charged with keeping the peace of a reluctant population that is hardly without it's own fair share of faith-filled crazies. It really bodes well for peace in the region when the only thing currently preventing out-and-out anarchy in the occupied territories is slowly being filled with men who believe they are doing the work of god with just as much conviction as your average suicide bomber.

The Israeli top-brass say they are not worried because the army has strict secular codes that all soldiers must obey, and all these Rabbis are merely junior officers. Well, what happens in the heat of battle, when some messianic lieutenant gives an order that might be consistent with the will of Yahweh (something like 'thou shalt killeth them all, spare not ye their women, neither spare ye their children, nor their cattle, their sheep nor their goats, nay, thou shalt killeth them all that thou shalt taketh this thy land which your god, who is a merciful god, has given to you; oh and by the way, don't kill all the chickens cos I'll use one later' etc) rather than the army code ('go in, kill the ones with guns and stylish bomb belts, tie up the rest and leave the bloody chickens alone' etc)? I do of course exaggerate (slightly) for comic effect but it can't be good. And where do you suppose the next generation of top brass comes from? From the current crop of Colonels and Majors of course. And what happens when Rabbi lieutenants distinguish themselves in battle? They will be promoted... Captain - Major - Colonel... you see where I'm going with this; wouldn't it be great if some of the Generals of the region's most powerful army truly believed with all their hearts that Israel was given to them by god? It would be a bit like making Pat Robertson a General and putting him in charge of NATO forces in Afghanistan - in other words a truly horrifying prospect for anyone not completely high on scripture.

Well that feels a little bit better, to get that irritation and pent-up sarcasm off my chest, but as is so often the case, anger at religion and its self-righteous practitioners, and their feeble-minded total certainty that what they believe and do is absolutely 100% right, gives way to a sadness at the condition of our species, a real sense of worry about our collective future. Here we are in the 21st century (depending on your calender of course) knowing so much, capable of achieving so much, with a real idea of our place in the Universe, striving forward - and yet still we have one foot shackled to our ignorant past, as though caught in a gin-trap. We try to march into the future with our seven-league boot of knowledge, uncertainty and critical inquiry on our front foot, whilst the bloody trap of superstition, myth and an ignorance that is the hallmark of total certainty spills countless gallons of our blood. Part crippled by this trap and the festering tendrils of infection it tries to spread into our whole body, will we ever manage to prise open the jaws of the trap, break the chain and heal our wounds? Will we stumble on carrying the dead-weight of chains and trap, weakened by infection? Or will it bring us down and leave us dying in the dust and blood from which, with total certainty, we know we were made?