So, as mentioned, I think we've probably got bigger problems than perverted priests... But damned if I didn't go anyway...   (read more)

So I generally take a pretty live-and-let-live attitude toward religious people and clerics. As regards the Pope's current state visit to Britain, my position is probably that he should be allowed to visit Britain like pretty much anyone else...   (read more)

So what better cutesty animal video to kick off Good Friday with than Christian the Lion! (No, he didn't get the name from eating Christians.)...   (read more)

With a hat tip to Andrew Sullivan, here are Christopher Hitchens's Ten Commandments Reimagined....   (read more)

I grew up listening to George Carlin's Class Clown album in secret. (I seem to recall my aunt buying it, not having a good sense of what she was getting into, and then needing to get it out of my grandmother's house - and into my mother's, and mine.)...   (read more)

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and (thus) head of the Church of England, gave a speech in which he predicted that the adoption of some parts of sharia (Islamic religious law) within the UK were "inevitable"...   (read more)

"And fight in the Way of Allah [1] those who fight you ... And kill them wherever you find them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out."...   (read more)

One knew, of course, that the whole racket of American evangelism was just that: a heartless con run by the second-string characters from Chaucer's "Pardoner's Tale." (You saps keep the faith. We'll just keep the money.)...   (read more)

Shortly after posting my recent piece on the spectacularly and amusingly unsuccessful attacks in London and Glasgow, I realised I'd mislabelled the perpetrators in calling them "losers". Much more apt would have been the lovely, amusing, and oh-so-useful British epithet of "muppets". These guys truly are muppets of the first rank, and they're running a Muppet Jihad....   (read more)

"As I write these words, and as you read them, people of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all the hardwon human attainments that I have touched upon. Religion poisons everything." - Christopher Hitchens...   (read more)

"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciouslyly malevolent bully." - Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion...   (read more)