On the Guardian website, there’s a - well, let's say a series of posts, called Blogging the Qur’an. They call it a debate, but I’m not quite sure why.

The two participants in the debate, Ziauddin Sardar and Madeleine Bunting, are both metaphysicals ( I know it isn't a noun in the dictionary, I've personalised it as a term of abuse), and both have written articles arguing their religious point of view on the website before.

They are spiritual liberals. To refresh your memory, the typical line goes like this.

• We hear voices in our heads. They are real.
• All the other people who hear voices in their heads are right as well, and all the people who say we're deluding ourselves are just meanies.
• We have holy books. Common people who think books mean what they say they mean like to point out all the psychotically cruel things, but we rise above it, because we know they're just metaphors for abstract concepts only we can understand, and shouldn't be confused with ordinary books which do mean what they say.
• Yes this does make sense. The only reason you think things mean what they say is because you don't have our subtlety of thought.

So far, so typical. What's annoyed me though is that the Comments function, normally such a mainstay in the section they have after all chosen to call Comment is free, has been disabled. How this carefully mediated religious love-in deserves to be called a debate when it’s actually less like a debate than anything else they publish is a mystery. I emailed them to ask, but received no response.

To be fair, you can comment by email, and they do publish a selection of them. I had one published (Your say, second email), and Mr Sardar did respond to it (Answers to more questions, fourth paragraph down). In fact, that's why I'm writing this. His response annoyed me so much, it’s inspired me to start a separate blog, just for him. I've called it Blogging the Qur'an - the free debate. Anyone can comment, whatever they believe.

There are rules. I decided to use the Guardian’s own talk policy. It seems perfectly adequate to cover the discussion they decided not to allow.

There will be one extra rule. In order to allow the debate to take place, any remark which breaks the rules of civilised debate will still be allowed, if it is a direct quotation from one of the world’s holy books. Otherwise, it’s hard to see how the debate could ever take place.

There's only one post at the moment. Expect more to follow very soon.