They're having a special competition for writers. First prize $300, which is almost worth something in the real world. Especially when compared with the 24 cents I've amassed the normal way.

You have to write on a topic. Most of the topics are fairly lame, but I was inspired by the question Why spring only occurs on one half of the planet to write this.

You know those meat roasting things they have in kebab shops? The ones with the upright spike on a rotating base next to a grill? As the mechanically recovered lamb revolves oh so temptingly, the grill radiates heat and the block ends up evenly overcooked. Every time a hen party staggers in demanding something to soak up the Bacardi breezers, a homesick and weary Albanian man slices off another few vertical sections, stuffs them into a pitta with some surprisingly hot chilli sauce and off go the girls to eat a third and throw the rest at policemen.

You’re probably sweating a bit by now, especially if you didn’t think on about protective clothing, but now you know why spring only occurs on one half of the planet at a time. And you’ve got a bread roll. Yes, I know it’s unevenly baked. That’s the point. Duh-uh.

I should think the $300 dollars is virtually in the bag, wouldn't you? If anyone can offer any technical improvements, please just add them to the comments.

Like a lisping Xenophon, I have realithed that thith part of my journey hath run its courth. I've just run out of things to say about religion.

I'm sure there'll be the odd infidel rant, but from now on it's open season on every subject under the sun. Any little whimsy that I get, you get.

There's a website called Helium. It lets you post articles, and there's Google Ads, or some such. As the author, you get a percentage of the clickthrough.

The articles are organised by topic, and each topic is divided into titles. Top rated articles appear at the top of the list, and will get more clicks. The rating is done by other contributors, and this is how.

When you submit an article, it asks you to judge two other articles. You click to say which one you liked the best, and by how much. The article you pick gets a positive score, the other article gets a negative score. Once you've judged an article, it gives you two more.

Self-evidently, the average article has a score of 0. This means that new articles go in the middle of the list when you first post them.

It seems to let you judge as many as you like. I judged twenty or thirty pairs before I got bored. Unfortunately, because I posted in the Religion section, I got article after article of Christians sharing their joy. If only they were more selfish with it. It seems that Jesus dislikes all forms of literary affectation, but is quite relaxed about spelling and punctuation. Faced with a lack of criteria for differentiating the drivel, I voted for brevity, and penalised people for using all capitals, or not enough paragraphs.

Into the section headed Good without God: Secular humanism and morality, I submitted this piece, customised from a previous post here, and as you might expect it went in at number 4, out of a total of 7.

Imagine my surprise though when I went back today and it had risen to number 1. More importantly, since I submitted it on Tuesday it's made me 7 whole cents.

And to think I was beginning to worry that writing would never make me any money.

Michael Novak, philosopher, conservative and Catholic godbotherer, weighs in here on the Dawkins/Dennett/Harris wave of atheist books.

He's writing for the American Enterprise Institute for Policy Research, but we won't hold it against him. We may perhaps note in passing that he shares this platform with Jean Kirkpatrick and Newt Gingrich, but that's up to him, and we certainly wouldn't want to indulge in any ad hominem attacks on that account, would we?

One of his criticisms is that science was nurtured by the Church, and in the Arab world by Islam. This is true up to a point, but as Dawkins points out, that was because the religious establishment controlled the intellectual world. It was an unequal relationship, in which the rational mind was only allowed to flower when it reached conclusions which religion wanted it to find. Galileo's struggles with Pope Urban VIII are famous, but perhaps less known are the condemnations of the University of Paris in 1277. Concerned about the free thinking going on there, the Bishop of Paris decided to help them in their studies by listing all the things they were to find to be true. The list ran to 219 propositions, covering such subjects as causality, free will and the Aristotelian ideas of the Islamic scholar Ibn Rushd (known as Averroes). The latter was himself persecuted, for rationalist doctrines with conflicted with Islam.

Not that it was always like this, of course. The point, though, is that rational analysis will never sit easily with ideas of revealed truth. Science may have come under the heading of religion for over a millennium, but its real flowering has come after the shackles were removed. This is why it has done better in the west than it has in the Islamic world, where religion won.

He also asks why atheism hasn't been more successful than it has. In northern Europe we don't need to ask this, as he recognises elsewhere, but the persistence of religion obviously needs to be considered.

Dawkins and Dennett expand at some length on evolutionary theories of religion. The main argument goes like this.

When the human brain was evolving, it had to learn to assess sensory input and distinguish between the physical environment, rocks, mud and vegetation, and purposive agents - animals and other humans. Mistaking the rustling of trees for predators is a nuisance, but mistaking predators for the rustling of trees is fatal. Seeing faces in clouds is distracting, but seeing clouds in faces denies you useful information about the people around you. Therefore, brains would have been likely to evolve the habit of overemphasising the degree of purpose around them rather than the reverse.

This accounts for our habit of conversing with inanimate objects, the theory says. It also accounts for our belief that the world is being kind or cruel when good or bad things happen to us, and thus for our religion. There is an old saying to the effect that religion is humanity's attempt to communicate with the weather, and the evolutionary theory of religion is that saying writ large.

I dunno, myself. One of the problems I have with evolutionary psychology is the way it always seems to be trying to find plausible selective arguments for the universal experience of ideas I've never shared, and emotions I've never felt. Maybe I should get out more, but maybe it's not just me.

I think I can account for the persistence of religion with this list. Physical coercion, social pressure, fear of death, fear of hell or divine wrath, a now fortunately historical lack of alternative explanations for physical phenomena, alms, priestly hegemony, charlatanism, epilepsy and psychedelic plants. I have to say I'm not immediately seeing what it is about religion that isn't explained by one or more of the above.

One of the most important factors here may well turn out to be alms. It's very noticeable that the societies who have been most successful in abandoning religion are the ones with reliable Welfare States.

Not that Novak adds anything to this analysis. He declares that Dennett's idea of "natural" is not large enough to comprehend even the heroic fidelity of Natan Sharansky, nor the timeless, liberating power of King David's poignant Psalms but doesn't explain why not.

He talks at quite astounding length about Sharansky, Soviet dissident, scientist and lapsed atheist. Apparently Sharansky found God in the gulag, and was persecuted for it. He berates the secular authors for not considering Sharansky or anyone like him, but fails to produce anything that might convince, except for a description of a prisoner's internal thoughts.

This always happens with religious polemicists. Faced with a lack of evidence for their position, they are always forced back on their own personal experiences, or even more dubiously those of others. Yet despite all their efforts they can never give us a good reason why brain processes should be considered trustworthy in the absence of external verification.

And yet the history of humanity should alert us to the dangers of this. At different times and in different places people have claimed, based purely on their own internal monologues, that Jesus was a chunk of God, hived off from the main body and sent down to live a human life, that Zeus gave birth out of his thigh, that Mohamed wrote the Koran under dictation from an angel, that God puts kings on earth to rule in his name and to defy them is sinful, that the gods will destroy the world unless they receive enough human sacrifice and that the parlous state to which Bristol Rovers have been reduced is somehow undeserved.

How can the religious ignore this lunatic litany, and carry on as if their own experiences were different, privileged?

He also says things like this, about his daughter's experiences at university.

Yet it didn't take my daughter long to see through the pretenses of atheism. In the first place, the fundamental doctrine seemed to be that everything that is, came to be through chance and natural selection. In other words, at bottom, everything is irrational, chancy, without purpose or ultimate intelligibility. What got to her most was the affectation of professors pretending that everything is ultimately absurd, while in more proximate matters putting all their trust in science, rationality, and mathematical calculation. She decided that atheists could not accept the implications of their own metaphysical commitments. While denying the principle of rationality "all the way down," they wished to cling to all the rationalities on the surface of things. My daughter found this unconvincing.

Honestly, this man is supposed to be a philosopher, a serious commentator. He complains that secularists show a lack of respect, then he comes out with gibberish like this.

This really shouldn't need saying, but natural selection does not mean that everything is irrational, chancy, without purpose or ultimate intelligibility. It means that genes survive by being able to make copies of themselves. Science does not simply claim the principle of rationality, it sets out to demonstrate it. Scientists do not work by putting all their trust in science, rationality, and mathematical calculation. They work by constructing hypotheses and subjecting them to experimentation.

He then goes on to explain what Christianity is actually about. It is about jelly. It is about clouds of nebulous rhetoric, drunk on its own grandiloquence. One is reduced to rereading it over and over again in the hope of squeezing out a soupcon of consistency, or even flavour, without success.

At one point, he says that when its practical implications are compared with those of the Christian viewpoint, evolutionary biology may not be attractive as a way of life. I don't recall ever thinking of evolution as a lifestyle choice. I mainly use it to account for the existence of complex biological entities, personally. I suppose that this may seem a trifling point if you follow the jelly religion, where everything mixes into one great vague melting pot with everything else, but to me it seems germane.

Most damningly, he's so busy spooning out the jelly he makes no attempt to explain the problematic bits of the Bible. Nothing about homophobia, sexism, ethnic cleansing. And yet he describes himself as a Catholic. He can focus on the jelly if he likes, but it's the hellfire that worries us.

Note for US readers - in the UK jelly is the wobbly stuff with gelatine in it, not the fruit and sugar conserve that comes in jars. I believe you call it Jell-O.

You may have heard that professional bon vivant and occasional cricketer Freddie Flintoff has been in the news again. This time he's been out on the lash on the very night of England's rather characterless defeat by New Zealand, culminating in a drunken jaunt on a pedalo which he had to be rescued from. He was out for 0, and really should have been far too busy sulking like Achilles in his tent for any nautical shenanigans.

He's on St Lucia. In the Caribbean. The World Cup is on. No, the cricket World Cup. That other World Cup finished months ago. Do try and keep up.

He was very contrite today, if a little reticent on the details. There was water and there was a pedalo, he said. It’s not something I want to get into. It's a bit late for not getting into things, frankly.

We really can't be having it. Apart from the bad example to impressionable youth yada yada yada, he was supposed to be playing again 30 hours later. Also, what if he'd made it out of harbour, picked up a trade wind and found himself pedalling into Guantanamo Bay. We might never have seen him again.

So there has to be a forfeit. He got suspended for a game, but that just meant they missed out on his talents. They saw off mighty Canada in the end, but it was a close run thing at times. Surely we can find a suitable punishment which doesn't penalise the team and the fans as well.

I would humbly suggest that sportsmen in this position should be subjected to a bush tucker trial. That way, the managers get their pound of flesh, the player is punished, we get entertained and the kids see that drunken antics don't pay. They're in the Caribbean, I bet there's some exemplary creepy crawlies, ideal for the purpose.

And my favourite character from the tournament so far? Bermuda's Dwayne Loverock. A name that ranks with Dirk Diggler, and a physique more obviously suited to sumo wrestling. No wonder they love him so much.

There is a strand of Christian, Jewish and Muslim religious argument which goes like this.

Of course you can go through the Bible or the Koran and pick out some repulsive quotes. This is because they were written a long time ago. We don't suggest that the whole of our holy books are literally true any more, we simply see them as metaphors for deeper truths.

There are some points about this approach which immediately leap to mind.

Firstly, you may not take these books literally, but a lot of people do, and as a result they can say and do some extremely unpleasant things. We are concerned about these people, who are arguably the majority of theists in the world, and we insist on our right to robust debate with them, whether or not you think we are being sufficiently respectful.

Also, as metaphors, as guides for behaviour, as history, even as literature, both books are rubbish. You'd have to give the King James Bible some credit for phrase-making, but most of that is down to the translators. The Koran is quite the most tediously repetitive book I have ever read, although again there is the occasional rhetorical felicity.

If you want a moral code, Kant or Russell are better. If you want history, Robin Lane Smith is better. If you want literature, Shakespeare is better. If you want metaphors, bloody Star Wars is better.

When people cherry pick from the Books, they apply modern criteria. We like the stuff about being nice to each other, so we take that out and ignore the stuff about subjugating women and stoning sodomites. If you're going to cherry pick, what is it about the nice bits that makes them nice? The bits that aren't viciously cruel are frankly unremarkable.

Having said all that, obviously if people must have conversations with their imaginary friend we'd rather they were nice ones. Cherry pickers may seem odd to us, and we may dislike the mental tricks they use to get to where they are, but if every religious person in the world became a religious moderate the world would clearly be all the better for it.

There's another reason why we like the moderates better, which is to do with our methods. We take the position that we'll beat the religious in a fair fight, and that over the generations for every one of us they persuade, we'll persuade ten of them. In particular, we think that if given fair access to children we can reduce the percentage of religious belief in each successive generation. If we're wrong, if religion turns out to have virtues which outweigh its flaws in the public mind even in the absence of coercion, then that's up to them.

What we do object to is the deliberate undermining of children's critical facilities, through faith schools, Koran chanting and the like. I grew up in an atheist household, as it happens, but I never went to atheist Sunday school. No-one ever took me to the local Humanist Society offices and bathed my forehead in unholy water. In fact, we were all Christened in a church, because that's what people used to do.

I was never told that I had been born into the atheist faith community, or that my parents' metaphysical beliefs created obligations for me. I was only ever told that it was up to me to make up my own mind. At school and in the Scouts, I was taught about religion, with massive emphasis on the guy nailed to the planks, and subjected to various religious rituals, all of which I resented.

I resented them because even at that age the contrast between my parents' laissez-faire attitude and the strict enforcement of the God botherers was clear to me. If offered a genuinely free choice between one group saying "think as you're told" and another group saying "make up your own mind", it's clear which way most children will go. If offered a real choice between one group saying "make up your own mind, but we think you're really going to like these books from the Iron Age" and another group saying "make up your own mind, here's a Playstation", it's just as clear, frankly. Even if you don't like Playstations.

With eight games left in the season, Bristol City are currently in second place, 4 points ahead of Notts Forest. Alas, their run-in is a lot easier than ours. We've got to play them in a fortnight, but otherwise we have to play Yeovil, Swansea and Doncaster, whereas none of Forest's opponents are seriously challenging for promotion or the playoffs except us. Five of them are scrapping to avoid relegation, which from our point of view is a double-edged sword. On the one hand they have a good motive to play hard, but on the other they can't be that good or they wouldn't be down there in the first place.

I reckon that if we're still ahead with three games left, we'll win. We end with Carlisle, Millwall and Rotherham, while Forest have Bournemouth, Orient and Crewe. The game against Forest, at home on March 31st, is obviously crucial.

Oh yeah, the theme. There isn't any God, you know. I don't quite know why you thought there ever was.

I've recently given up being a vegetarian, after twenty four years. I've learnt a few things I didn't know about meat (for instance there doesn't seem to be any of it in dessert, rather unfairly in my view). But how have my fellow vegetarians reacted?

With a surprising lack of rancour. There's been the odd raised eyebrow, and they don't seem to think it's funny when I ask them if they'd like some mackerel with their coffee, but no-one's actually said anything. Who'd have thought apostasy was so easy?

Not Muslims, that's for sure. To quote Wikipedia (from here), "All five major schools of Islamic jurisprudence agree that a sane male apostate must be executed. A female apostate may be put to death, according to some schools, or imprisoned, according to others".

What this means is that if you are a Muslim who rejects Islam, the official teaching of the religion is that you should be put to death. The liberals think women should only be locked up for it, but this imprisonment is to last until you change your mind.

It is not the Koran that prescribes the death penalty but the Hadith, the quotes attributed to Mohamed and statements about him made by people who claim to have been eyewitnesses. The Koran, rather than asking for earthly punishment, simply dwells gloatingly and sadistically on the tortures awaiting the apostate after they die.

Here is a quote from Sahih Bukhari, a collector of hadith who lived in the ninth century.

Allah's Apostle [that's Mohamed] said, The blood of a Muslim, who confesses that none has the right to be worshipped but Allah and that I am His Apostle, cannot be shed except in three cases: In Qisas [retaliation] for murder, a married person who commits illegal sexual intercourse and the one who reverts from Islam (apostate) and leaves the Muslims.

Some modern Islamic scholars disagree with this, but it should be noted that they are generally regarded as deviant and unreliable by the mainstream, and by some as apostates themselves.

This kind of thing has consequences for us. You may have noticed the arrival of Muslim faith schools, you may have seen classes in Islamic instruction being attended by children who frankly really ought to be on their Playstation or something. They are being taught that if they abandon their faith, they deserve to be subject to the death penalty. They are being taught that apostasy, and for that matter adultery, are worse crimes than rape, assault and battery or malicious wounding, which do not receive the death penalty.

Notice too that it's not as if the children of Muslim parents are being given a choice whether they sign up to this program or not. If you're born into a Muslim family in Britain in 2007, according to the tenets of the faith you have no more right to choose your belief than you would have had if you'd been born in Cairo a millennium ago. You will be told what religion you belong to, taught to follow the teachings of the Koran (which for girls includes the rule that their husbands are allowed to beat them if they don't obey him - Sura 4 verse 34), and if you decide that you'd rather be a secular humanist instead you will live out your life under a death sentence.

That's the theory, anyway. In practice, fortunately, most people are better than their religions, and you might be lucky enough to have the kind of family that turns a blind eye. I wouldn't expect to be free to join in public debate, though. If you want to argue your case, you'd best get a secure and secret address to do it from.

I really don't think we've properly taken this on board. According to the last census there are about 1.6 million Muslims in the UK. Given the level of coercion that surrounds their lives it's difficult to give a figure for how many are secretly atheist, agnostic or committed to a different religion, but let's say it's only one per cent. That would mean 16,000 people being forced to pretend to be Muslims in this country today.

This is a national scandal. Something must be done. It must be made clear to all children of Muslim parents that they have rights, that they will be protected if they make choices about their beliefs that clash with those of their parents. Special support must be offered to gay teenagers from that background. Girls must be told that if their husband hits them, he will be arrested and they will be offered support. There must be refuges, and anyone threatening them must be made to desist.

Most crucially, people who believe in the death penalty for apostasy should not be allowed to run schools. Faith schools are wrong in principle, as a denial of the civil right of children not to be defined by the religion of their parents, but this is more than a theoretical problem. Surveys show that about half of young British Muslims believe in the death sentence for apostasy. This is a ticking time bomb. To borrow a phrase from Sam Harris, why is it taboo to notice this?

The clerics will complain of Islamophobia. Let them. Tell them that the day they denounce this evil doctrine, we will stop denouncing them.

Everyone, of course, has these rights, whatever background they are from. Read the book of Deuteronomy if you think there's only one disastrous religious tradition in the world. Chapter 13, verses 6 to 10 demand the stoning to death of any apostates who dare to argue their case. Augustine, the enforcer of the early Christian church, thought heretics should be tortured. There are always people from all religious traditions who choose not to coerce, and they should be supported and protected from their more demanding brethren.

Atheists also have a moral obligation not to enforce their beliefs on their children. Fortunately, this won't inconvenience us all that much. My parents were both atheists, but I don't recall ever being made to recite the works of Bertrand Russell, or having bits of my body removed to symbolise the absence of God.

And finally let's hear it for vegetarians, so much more tolerant than the metaphysicals. Unless you find my body in the gutter, smothered oh so ironically in tofu.

This one's well worth a look.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=fDp7pkEcJVQ

Kenan Malik, reviewing Sam Harris' latest book Letter to a Christian Nation in this piece in the Telegraph, argues that the problem with secularists who write about religion is that they are "interested solely in the question of the truth and falsity of a religion's creed, and tend to ignore the other dimensions of faith" (the words are his, but he attributes the sentiment to philosopher Julian Baggini).

He rather misses the point that Harris specifically aims his book at fundamentalist Christians rather than moderates. In the US, of course, this is a large slice of the population, and Harris is very worried about these people. When he talks about fundamentalism he means a dogmatic belief in an inerrant holy book, and this is the subject he addresses.

Malik appears to be a religious moderate, by which I mean someone who is more concerned with the experience than with the text. That's fine, if you've got nothing better to do, but it's not Harris' concern.

Lots of people have exciting hobbies. Some people like to race cars. Malik likes to imagine metaphysical dimensions. That's his business.

It's everyone else's business, though, when private pleasures intrude disastrously into the public domain. Malik races his car on his own track, and that's up to him. What bothers us is the people who race their cars on the public highway, whose top priority is their own divinely revealed Highway Code. We don't care how much fun they're having, how richly satisfying their experiences are, we're only concerned with the effects of their actions. Malik may not be hurting anyone himself, but by attacking people who are trying to safeguard the public highway, even when they make it perfectly clear they're not talking about him, he's making life easier for the joyriders.

It's cruel to mock, thrillingly so, and sometimes you can't resist.

Here, from the BBC Religion message boards, is quite the most imaginative refutation of evolution I've ever read.

For many years I have been handling UK £10 Notes. These have throughout had an impress of Charles Darwin (1809 - 1882). Over this same very long period. I have methodically and carefully observed that Charles has not changed (evolved) even one tiny bit. This, I submit, having been scientifically undertaken, can be taken as irrefutable evidence that the Theory of Evolution is, in fact, what it is shown to be - False!

This must truly be taken to be the last 'last word' on "Evolution versus Creationism."

Thanks for that, glorybe21. It is indeed the last word on the subject, at least until I catch my breath. It's been three hours now, and I think I've nearly caught it.

OK, here we go. Anyone easily wearied by repetitive explanations of the bleeding obvious may choose to look away now.

Natural selection works like this. Every biological entity, whether plant, animal or other, has a genetic code, stored as a double helix molecule known as DNA. This code is like a blueprint, or perhaps rather more like a computer program, for the construction of the entity. It's actually slightly different in the case of viruses, but we'll leave that aside for the purposes of this discussion.

When the entity reproduces, its code is passed down to the next generation. In the case of single celled organisms such as bacteria, a cell simply splits, and both new cells have the original code. In the case of sexual reproduction (animals and plants), excluding exceptions such as hermaphrodites, a male mates with a female, and they each provide one helix of the DNA.

Now, in order to reproduce an entity has to survive to adulthood, find a partner in the case of sexual reproduction, etc. The more suited an animal is to its environment, the more copies of itself it can make. The next generation is subject to the same pressures. Unfit code, ie code which generates entities which are unable to reproduce, will be eliminated. Over the generations, bad designs will be sifted out like lumpy flour, and only the good, fine-grained designs will remain. For a code, good/bad is defined simply as fitted/unfitted to make many copies of itself.

Changes are introduced to the code through mutation. Every now and again, an error occurs when the code is being copied. The vast majority of these changes are harmful, and are eliminated. Some are neither harmful nor advantageous, and may or may not thrive according to random chance. A few, though, are genuine improvements, and these are more likely to survive.

The Darwin tenners are not an example of this process. Firstly, there is no competition between tenners. Secondly and most importantly, tenners are not made by copying each new tenner from the previous one. Instead, the original design is printed out millions of times, from the same template. Therefore, and this is the bit where the sledgehammer finally cracks the nutjob, therefore the fact that Darwin's picture has not "evolved" does not in itself refute the theory of evolution.

Sorry to put you all through that. I would never say this to my students, but honestly, if you didn't already know that you must be a bit thick.

Hitler ruled Germany for twelve years, Poland for five and large sections of the Soviet Union for two or three.

During World War Two, an estimated 63 million died. Millions of those died in the east, though, especially in China. Let's say Hitler killed 50 million people.

If each of those 40 million lost 40 years of life, that's a total loss of 2 billion years of human experience.

On top of this, everyone else had a pretty rotten time. That's a billion people in the western theatre of war, let's say, who had let's say an average of 5 years suffering. That's 5 billion years in all.

Let's add these two random numbers together for no reason. Now we have an arbitrary made-up value for the evil of Hitler, based on years of human experience lost or ruined. It's seven billion years.

Let's now assume that the repercussions of Hitler's rule double this. This represents global post traumatic stress disorder, the suffering while economies were rebuilt, everyone who grieved for people they lost, all of it. We now have a figure of 14 billion years.

Notice that this dumps the whole thing on one man's shoulders. There's no consideration of hyperinflation in Germany in the Twenties, how many Poles were actually killed by Stalin, or any of that. It's fairly much the maximum evil attributable to Hitler.

Now let's consider Jesus. My text for the day comes from Matthew 25:41.

Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.

So how does this text compare? Well firstly, obviously, there's the unnecessary use of the capital D on Depart. Let's let him off that, though, and just concentrate on the burning.

You may recall this verse. The whole chapter can be read here. It's the one where he sits the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. The sheep get heaven, the goats get hell. It's the direct words of Jesus, so don't believe any of that crap about how all the bad bits are in the chapters attributed to Paul.

So, the maths. It's said that one in thirty of all the humans who have ever existed are alive today. Let's give Jesus the benefit of the doubt, though, and let's just include those who may have heard his message. Based on Wikipedia's calculations for world population, I reckon that's about 20 billion people.

Now they do say the Christian path is the road less travelled, but let's give him the benefit of more doubt, and let's assume there's as many sheep as there are goats. That's 10 billion people in the flames. If Jesus was the equivalent of Hitler, he'd have to burn them for about 17 months each.

Unfortunately, though, it's the everlasting fire. As 10 billion times infinity equals infinity, It follows that you can't possibly compare Hitler to Jesus. Jesus is infinitely worse.

This is a completely facetious post, obviously. In fact, it's my Dave Gorman moment. Given the billions of Christians in human history who have believed in the literal truth of this text, though, and given the plenitude of similar texts in the Koran, you have to wonder what effect this appalling vision has had on human history. No wonder Torquemada thought he was doing the Lord's work. After all, he was only inflicting a small fraction of Jesus' everlasting carnival of pain.

When defending religion, people sometimes argue that even if it doesn't make any logical sense, it inspires people to behave better. If you point out its flaws, you're just undermining society's ethical sense.

It seems a rather patronising proposition, to leave the lower orders to their delusions in the hope that it might deter them from walking on the flower beds, but still, let's analyse it through one of my favourite techniques, the secular analogy.

Have you ever met any members of the British Communist Party? Not the Trotskyists or suchlike, the old-style communists who disintegrated into a welter of competing factions in the seventies and eighties.

Lovely people. Honestly, you'd be amazed. Generally imbued with optimism, humanity and an interest in Celtic folk music, they're the real good Samaritans of the modern world. Which is why it's so hard to understand their enthusiasm for the Soviet system, so famously the exact opposite of all that. It's a good thing the Russians never invaded, they'd have been so disappointed.

But if life turns against you, and you find yourself lying at the side of the road in need of a good Samaritan, then you couldn't do much better than a British Communist. Emergency services will be alerted, provisions will be shared, your possessions will be entirely safe. They may sing a bit, but otherwise they're perfectly sweet.

You see the analogy, I'm sure. Two questions. Firstly, have you attributed any part of their goodness to Stalin? Secondly, are you motivated to encourage the survival of Marxism-Leninism in the world?

Another similarity between communists and the religious. The farther they are from power, the nicer they are.

Here's a fascinating new contribution to scholarship. It's called Conservapedia. Trips off the tongue, doesn't it?

Conservapedia is a much-needed alternative to Wikipedia, which is increasingly anti-Christian and anti-American, it says. It reproduces a reasonable facsimile of the Wikipedia front page, but doesn't have the logo with the globe. Perhaps the roundness of it upsets them. Today in history (renamed from Wikipedia's On this day) covers March 2 to March 7. Five of the six entries refer to events in American history. Presumably any less than five sixths of world history would reflect an anti-American bias.

Here are some rather wonderful little snippets from their piece on kangaroos.

Kangaroos are the largest Marsupials alive today. They currently are native to the continent of Australia.

Currently? Oh, please read on.

Their legs are strong and powerful, designed by God for leaping.

Which is certainly more than I am. It's perhaps a rather striking claim for an encyclopaedia though.

According to the origins model used by creation scientists, modern kangaroos, like all modern animals, originated in the Middle East and are the descendants of the two founding members of the modern kangaroo baramin that were taken aboard Noah's Ark prior to the Great Flood.

Um, OK. What's a baramin, exactly?

A baramin is a lineage of earthly life which is believed by creationists to be created by God during the Creation Week, and corresponds in some functional aspects to the secular concept of species.

Ah. Wait, there's more.

Also according to creation science, after the Flood, kangaroos bred from the Ark passengers migrated to Australia. There is debate whether this migration happened over land -- as Australia was still for a time connected to the Middle East before the supercontinent of Pangea broke apart -- or if they rafted on mats of vegetation torn up by the receding flood waters.

It's certainly a relief to know that such a journey is still subject to debate. The weird thing is the way they accept continental drift, but still cling to a six thousand year timespan. How fast do they think continents move? At that rate Scotland will get to Preston in our lifetime.

It's just embarrassing, obviously, like your grandma trying to join in a conversation about the Clash. Still, it may offer us an opportunity for some fun. I've registered with them, and I'm going to try and insert some thoughtful edits. Watch this space.

I'm saying nothing.

http://www.muhammaddressup.com/

Arguments about religion as a guide to moral behaviour often go like this.

Against: Religious people do bad things. They persecute unbelievers, they torture, they bomb, they murder.

For: Atheists also do these things. Most of the carnage of the twentieth century was caused by atheists like Hitler and Stalin.

Against: Yes, but they didn't do those things because they were atheists, they did them because they were Nazis, Leninists, Maoists or whatever.

For: That's also true of religious crimes though. They are usually about political power, and religion is just an excuse. When it doesn't give a convenient excuse for a political act, religion is ignored - for instance, William of Orange fought the Battle of the Boyne with the blessing of the Pope, and the French often allied themselves with the Muslim Ottoman Empire for reasons of political advantage.

You can bat this back and forwards for hours, finally collapsing spent on to the sofa with a sugar-based treat. I would point out the following though.

I'm British, so my ancestors were probably involved in the wars of the English Revolution. If you are too, then most likely so did yours. They may have fought for the divine right of kings, or they may have fought for the autonomy of Parliament. They may have wanted freedom of trade, or they may have been more concerned about taxes. Statistically, it's likely that many of them fought on both sides.

Just for the sake of argument, let's pretend yours all fought on one side, and mine all fought on the other. It doesn't matter. We'll never know, and wouldn't much care if we did.

But in the north of Ireland, everyone knows. This is because the Catholics were on one side, and the Protestants on the other. The victorious Protestants passed down their triumphalist metaphysics through Lodges and business organisation, while defeated Catholics put their children in separate schools, and taught them never to forget.

In practice, everyone in northern Ireland probably has ancestors on both sides as well, but their metaphysics obliges them to pretend history is less complex than it actually is.

These days, the antagonism between the two sides has more to do with jobs, housing or the police. The point is, though, religion does have a way of burdening today's social divisions with the ideological baggage of yesterday's.

Incidentally, the jury is out over whether Hitler was or wasn't an atheist. In time honoured religious fashion, he made many statements on the subject, most of them contradictory.

Grubby little hack I may be, or would be given the chance, but I'm an equal opportunities grubby little hack. I did the Bible yesterday, so today it's the Koran.

As for those who disbelieve in Our communications,

it says,

We shall make them enter fire;
so oft as their skins are thoroughly burned,
We will change them for other skins,
that they may taste the chastisement;
surely Allah is Mighty, Wise

Sura 4.56

The verse appears to be saying that people who don't believe in the Koran will be burnt alive for their disbelief, and that once their skin has been burnt off, and therefore their nerve endings, it will be replaced so that the torture can continue unabated. Very Wise, I'm sure.

One should always be careful with texts from another language, of course. It may well turn out that fire is a mistranslation for delicatessens, skins for strudels, and chastisement for sugary goodness. Even if true, however, that would still leave the other 171 instances of the word fire in my translation of the Koran to account for. I took a random sample of 20, and in all cases but one unbelievers were providing the kindling.

I like to use this quote for polemical purposes because of its sheer malice. The Bible of course is frequently just as offensive.

Let's assess this hypothetical deity’s moral code by applying a human analogy. I teach computing classes for adults in a Bristol community centre. I am currently the only tutor who runs classes in Photoshop. Suppose that a student had said that I wasn't the Photoshop tutor, that Baal or Zeus was, or that there were many tutors, or that there were no tutors and the students taught themselves.

This statement would in fact be incorrect, as I am the only Photoshop tutor (although some observers claim I actually send my son, who is simultaneously me). I might possibly be slightly peeved, although I probably couldn't be bothered. Either way, it would seem excessive to roast its originator over an open fire, even if I only burnt their skin off the once.

If I, small and imperfect as I am, can rise above such things, why can’t the creator of life, the universe and everything? Given his omniscience one might have hoped for a level of emotional maturity. What could it possibly be about disbelief that upsets him so much?

Like Jonathan Creek, Allah may well have come to find his disciples a little wearying. I only accuse him of non-existence, they accuse him of crimes (infinitely) worse than Hitler's. If I was him, I would claim to have been misrepresented.

This is a selective quote, of course. There are other things in the Koran which are perfectly nice, in an unremarkable kind of way. And Christian commentators can be just as bloodthirsty. The saintly Augustine, for instance, approves the use of torture for heretics, on the grounds that if finite earthly torture drives them to convert and saves them from infinite tortures in hell it must be a good deal for them.

But the point is, there are plenty of moral philosophers who manage to produce perfectly reasonable work without lapsing into war crimes every few pages. Why aren't they better than the holy rollers?