Occasional Tales

With a slice of brimstone, Robin. Perhaps Martin Cohen enjoyed writing this particular dilemma because it’s one of the lengthier ones in quite a while. The vicar of St Bartholomew’s in Lower Little Whitteringham is desperate to get bums on seats in the church until he strikes on the idea of holding a debate with a Muslim cleric, the topic being “Will suicide bombers go to heaven?” (No, they’ll just go to pieces. [Stop that! Stop that sort of thing right now! –ed.]) Not surprisingly, the church is full and then some, and the readings come from the more violent parts of the Old Testament before Mullah Al-Jazeera, looking like a pirate right down to a hook, appears in the pulpit. (Obviously, the book’s editor was so unnerved that they overlooked the sentence, “So today Islamic and Christian churches are untied in faith.” [My italics.]) He starts preaching, reading out some of the less moderate passages from the Koran while the vicar interjects with a few Biblical passages. At the end of ...

About time to blog on something else. I mentioned the story about Eunice Spry on Green Bamboo a few weeks ago. The latest news is that she's been sentenced to 14 years in prison ( Sadistic foster mother sentenced to 14 years in jail ). And what was her motivation? Religious zealotry. She's a target a mile wide or so, although I'll refrain from using her as a stick to beat religious hypocrisy. Nonetheless, the woman's behaviour was brutal, callous and cruel, although I bet she presented a pious face to the world and even now probably can't believe that she was wrong. The Italian government failed to recover a couple of panels by Fra Angelico ( Lost altar masterpieces found in spare bedroom fetch £1.7m ). Pity because they ought to be back in Florence. Actually, given how many historical treasures Italy has, they probably thought better of reacquiring them because of the exorbitant insurance premiums. The Sarko/Ségo Show continues to rumble on in France ( Floating vot...

...when the teeth meet resistance. I don't know whether this post by Tobias Jones in The Guardian's commentisfree section is very clever or merely the incoherent rantings of someone who writes like a first year undergraduate. Among other things, I think we might say that the entry is a good example of the vast difference between perception and reality. Perception: crime is everywhere; reality: no it isn't. Jones's perception is that some group of people called "secular fundamentalists" want to outlaw religious belief. The reality is that Jones is merely using the word "fundamentalist" which, he knows perfectly well, has pejorative connotations in English, and marrying it to the word "secular" in the same way that it's collocated with the adjectives "Christian" and "Islamic". They - call them secular fundamentalists - are anti-God, and what they really want is the eradication of religion, and all believers, from the ...